start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

Speaking of Teams, I know it's been said to death but those new emojis omg. Maybe they're there to be a difficult lesson for me to stop using emojis at work but Jesus they're just a little too fucking expressive

twice in the last hour the fire engine has come and silenced next door's alarm. twice it has restarted as they have driven away. it is 5:51.

As a frequent pedestrian, I'm increasingly IA about what I would call the Blind Diagonal Cross, wherein someone on the opposite side of the road will cross to the side I'm walking on, but not perpendicularly, oh heavens no. No no, they instead cut a diagonal swath across the road, somehow without ever really checking out the space around them at all, and they then wind up swooping just ahead of me on the sidewalk but at a pace just slightly slower than my own. Like the kind of maneuver that, in a car, would all but guarantee a fender bender. This may sound like a niche concern but I swear it happens multiple times in a given week.

(The variation on this which I love with just as much of my heart is when someone is stopped on the sidewalk, say to browse through a shop window, and then obliviously swings back into the middle of the sidewalk and begins walking directly ahead of me but only once they've somehow sensed that I will have to come to a dead stop in order to avoid running into them. This is also a frequent occurrence. I fear that I'm being Punk'd.)

have you checked lately to make sure you’re not a ghost?

Oh shit wait

cmon man this is basic stuff

This happens at the grocery store all the time. Someone will be stopped, checking out the Pringles, but as soon as I begin to pass by them, they start pushing their cart.

So now here comes Pleasant Plains and his new friend as DOUBLE TROUBLE, taking up both lanes and coming right at you at the end of the aisle.

Perhaps I’m also a ghost. Or a magnet. When I’m trying to browse a mostly empty shop, lingering in random but interesting places (it’s my alone time,) without fail, another person will come to stand literally between me and whatever I’m looking at. Counter productive to mental state to say the least.

Oh my gosh, grocery stores and shops are just IA-generators in so many ways. My increasing fave is the thing where I round the corner of an aisle, just need to quickly grab that thing right there...oh, someone else is in the way. No problem, no problem, they'll be making their selection any second now and I'll be able to jump on in there... Hmm, they're really deliberating on their options, huh. Maybe I'll just grab that other thing in the next aisle and come back. Okay, got it, and now...wait, they're still there? And...they don't appear to be actually deliberating. Or exactly conscious. They're just staring blankly at the shelves ahead of them. For like several solid minutes. What is this, just what, where am I right now

you say “excuse me” and get your thing

unless you’re a ghost, in which case all that would come out is a distant whistling echo

This ghost supposition is explaining so much.

I think at least some of this (and I hasten to add that the A in my IA is almost always more Annoyance or Amusement than like legit Anger) is COVID-related. I noticed early on once people were going back out into the world again that they'd forgotten how to occupy space alongside other people. And so for instance the thing where people will just stand transfixed, gazing upon a box of pancake mix like an infant watching a mobile rotate overhead. Bystanders don't exist in such a solemn moment.

You know, the Clash wrote a song about these kind of grocery store stories!

I believe it was called "Straight to Hell".

One time at the supermarket a man became a wolf

Can't believe you got to meet Conner Smedley

do ghosts even eat Pringles?

has anyone mentioned one of my top irrationally angry things yet

when your finger is dropping on the mouse button and some fuckin element loads and you end up not clicking what u wanted to click

it's like THEY KNOW

(tbf it's not always that they "know" it just happened to me on ilxor.com which i don't think was designed to get me to go to a tweet. IRRATIONAL)

Will M, YES that is the actual worst. I love going to websites on a mission to click or search specific thing, but have to click battle a parade of special offer pop ups and fucking chat bot helpers before they will let me even see the screen unimpeded. I’m getting angry just thinking about it.

the mobile - and desktop - web feels pretty seriously broken these days, just an awful awful experience that no sane organisation would design that way

I have learned that when I try to go to the NYT Spelling Bee forum, I have to wait for an ad to load, else my attempt to click on that day's page will be interpreted as clicking on the (not yet loaded) ad. It's only a few seconds but yeah, it's annoying

i hate hate hate hate hate talking on the phone and yet today all anybody at work has wanted to do is talk on the phone for things that could have easily been an email.

i hate the sound of my own voice and I hate teh interruptions and repetitions of calls so much.

(it's been relatively slow at work today for once, but I just haaaaate the phone)

buy magazine, scan magazine, touch card to reader, nothing. again, nothing.

eventually look at the reader and there's a POLL on it and it's waiting for an answer (from the previous customer?) and blocking payment until it's done.

people who, after being insulted by me, say things like "i bet u don't have the courage to say that to my/his/their face, keyboard warrior".

bro, i'm insulting you. if I wanted to be a dudebro and beat you up, i'd have looked up your address on a background check site, flown there, and thrown down. my weapon is wit, not my fault if your armory is barren.

(I don't believe in violence and haven't been in a fight since I was 15 and don't look to change that any time soon)

Customs charges every time something is sent from the UK as a book. But worst part is probably the fee that An Post slaps on the top which more than doubles the fee.

I totally get that I am going to be on hold for a while and am not angry about that, I am totally angry at this terrible hold music that is inexplicably three times louder than a normal human speaking over the phone voice.

when I worked in a callcentre (credit cards) our hold music was Shania Twain's "Party for Two" and Geri Halliwell's version of "It's Raining Men" - I had a theory that the hold music was deliberately annoying in order to encourage customers to call back at a less busy time.

yes

What, no Wallflowers version of "Heroes", or Puff Daddy's "Come with Me"?

DO NOT IGNORE THIS LETTER

you do not need to respond if: all information is correct

real hurry-up-and-wait vibes from local council

Falling asleep in front of the tv. Maybe I should listen to my body or something. Did it several times to several things last night then rewound each thing. Including something I had fallen asleep to the night before. Think I may have finally got to see all of that now but in a weird order as I watched the bits I didn't remember seeing. Need to watch episode for continuity and things like. Gah or indeed bah humbug.
Then went to bed and read and then couldn't get to sleep.

my mother walking in to ask if I'm still working drives me more nuts than it should. if I'm not still working, I always come outside of my room once I'm done, esp since then we can take dad to the bathroom. if I'm still in my room, I'm still working, and getting interrupted while I'm trying to finish up for the day just aggravates me. esp cos I'm usually trying to hurry up and finish and it often breaks my concentration on what I'm working on.

The now total divorce between what ASMR actually is and what people now use it to mean, ie basically any noise at all.

people who ask who I have a moment to chat and won't tell me what about drive me nuts.

idk the answer might depend on whether this is going to be a deep conversation about something or a quick chat, and how much time I have.

generally I'll ask what about and if they still won't tell me, I push it to later or never. do not like being ambushed.

people on slack who don't ask if I have a moment or come right out and say what they want, but just say "hi ledge how are you" and wait for me to respond. this isn't a social call, get on with it.

"i'm really shitty, how are you doing?"

yes, this is a pet peeve of mine

yeah its polite and all and i appreciate the gesture as a general rule .,, but for me its almost always deployed by a salesperson trying to butter me up for some annoying ask

Do you have a moment to chat about your car's extended warranty?

I've been seriously considering buying this T-shirt, which (in case the image doesn't post) says "We've Been Trying To Reach You About Your Car's Extended Warranty" in death metal band logo font:

https://res.cloudinary.com/teepublic/image/private/s--Zyjpup0k--/t_Resized%20Artwork/c_crop,x_10,y_10/c_fit,w_461/c_crop,g_north_west,h_626,w_470,x_-5,y_-4/g_north_west,u_upload:v1462829015:production:blanks:mtl53ofohwq5goqjo9ke,x_-400,y_-329/b_rgb:eeeeee/c_limit,f_auto,h_630,q_90,w_630/v1648744056/production/designs/20898916_1.jpg

this isn't a social call, get on with it.

the thing is, the other half of the population interpret diving straight in without any preamble to be rude. you can't win man

Yeah I get the impulse for it, and I'd never launch straight into an email or call or face to face meeting without the politeness preamble so it's definitely acquired behaviour. However I can and do win when I'm the asker by putting the preamble and request in the same message, without waiting for a response.

^^^^

yeah I prefer that so if I get hit with three messages like this at once, I know the scope of what's being asked of all three and how much time it might take to answer them. if I have three messages that just say "hi Neanderthal, how are you?" waiting, and they won't tell me what they're asking until I reply, i have no idea.

I think "Neanderthal, hope you are well. I need . . . " lands much better than "I need . . ."

yeah. and that's fine! that's what I usually do too.

just do it in one message, like others have said above. or send the greeting and then send what you need shortly after ,even if I don't reply.

i hope this chat finds you lying down on your couch

building on that, I love when you have an Out of Office message on in MS Teams/Outlook, and have sent people an email a few days in advance of that saying you're going to be out, and they still private message you anyway for stuff that needs immediate attention, and keep trying to ping you when you don't reply.

I had one person REPLY to my out of office email once and get mad at me, saying "I KNOW YOU'RE OUT, Neanderthal, I'm just telling you for when you get back, GEEZ", and I had to explain to them how out of office messages work. they thought i'd manually sent it from my vacation.

I accidentally sent email to my wife's old university address where she hasn't worked in 5 and half years and I got her outlook out of office response which kind of cracked me up. It's basically "I don't work here anymore, good luck"