Six Little Things That Irritate Me
Do you ever have “those days”? The ones where stupid little things grate on you? Of course you do. Well, I am having one today. And instead of letting it go to waste, I have decided to harness it into blog content. Actually, I started a list awhile ago. I was inspired to start my list after the eleventy-sixth time I had to search a web page for how to log off of it. And as other little irritants occurred, I would add them to my list. Until now, when I have enough of them assembled to make for a full-featured gripe session.
Why, you might ask, would you want to allow my gloomy day to interrupt the sunny perfection of your life? Because we all know that lots of little things irritate you too. So think of this as a public service, which will allow you to purge yourself of your own complaints and crotchets in the comments. And so we, in no particular order, begin.
Number 1 – Logging Off of Websites. I pay most of my bills online. This generally involves going to a website, logging in, and clicking on the various steps of “pay my bill” or something like that. It is all as easy as 1-2-3. Until it comes time to log off. That is when the irritation begins. Where is the “log off” or “sign out” button? Good question. Sometimes you have to go to a menu. Sometimes it is at the top of the screen. Sometimes it is at the bottom of a screen. Sometimes it is on a different menu from the main one. Sometimes it is easy and intuitive. Sometimes I need to click on a half-dozen things until I find it. I know, this is a minor thing. Bit it is a minor thing that is highly irritating.
Number 2 – Monthly Things That Are Not Monthly. While we are on the topic of online bill paying, there is another irritation. Most all of my monthly bills are due on a fixed day of every month. Which works fine for me, because most of my financial life has been on a monthly schedule. I don’t really care if a bill is due on the first day of the month or the last day of the month – if there is a rhythm for a particular bill, I will fit it into my own. But then there is my electric company. Some months the due date is the first or second of a month. Some months it is the last day or two of a month. The problem is this – is a particular bill part of (say) my August bills? Or is it part of my September bills? My system requires that it be one or the other, because it doesn’t like two electric bills in one month and zero in the next.
Yes, I know – I should just contact my electric company and ask them to change my billing date to something closer to mid-month. But if there is anything more irritating than due dates that bop between the end of one month and the beginning of the next, it is having to contact a utility company. About anything. Sometimes we just have to take (and like) a small irritation to avoid a bigger one.
Number 3 – The Order That Is Not An Order. I hear this one mostly with younger people. You are at a restaurant, and this person will ask “Can I have the shrimp alfredo pasta?” Why is this a question? The shrimp alfredo pasta (which I am making up for this example) is on the menu. There is no special request or substitution. So why not just tell the waitstaff “I’ll have the shrimp alfredo pasta.” After all, it is called an “order”.
When I hear this order-as-request-for-permission at a restaurant, I must stifle the temptation to reply “I don’t know, can you?” Which shows one more reason why I am not a restaurant server. Also, this gets us into the old “Can I” vs. “May I” grammatical controversy, another topic that brings out my inner curmudgeon. Who seems to live much closer to the surface than it did when I was a younger man.
Number 4 – Drivers who do not understand how to merge onto a highway. This one affects me almost every day. I spend my days driving a large truck on interstate highways. On two or three lane highways, I am almost always in the far right lane – partly because the truck speed limit in my state is 5 mph below that for cars, and partly because I am usually on these roads for a short time and will be exiting soon. As I drive along (minding my own business, of course) I will see a car that intends to merge onto the highway. As the entrance ramp gets close to converging into my travel lane, offending car is going almost exactly my speed, and the driver is making no effort to either 1) speed up and merge in ahead of me or 2) slow down and slip in behind me.
I used to make an effort to merge over into the lane to my left to make room for these oblivious drivers, but I have stopped doing that. Because when traffic is busy, the right lane will fill up with faster traffic that starts a parade of cars slowly passing me on the right, making merging back to the right land very difficult. And also because every lane change I make increases the chances of a collision, if only by a little. The words of my commercial driving instructor replay in my head – “It’s your lane, you don’t move. It is that merging car’s responsibility to go fast enough or slow enough to merge in.” Well, that is almost what he said – he actually peppered the statement with words that cannot be used in a family blog.
Number 5 – Commercials on Amazon Prime. I remember when I first signed up for Amazon Prime. It was an irresistible deal – Free delivery on Amazon purchases, and free movies with no commercials. But now my Prime movies are interrupted by commercials multiple times during the show. I still pay my annual fee, but now I get the commercials too. Even worse, they are commercials I cannot fast-forward through.
I used to be able to watch commercials for free. Then I signed up for cable television. Part of the pitch was that because I was paying a subscription, many channels had no commercials. But then they started showing commercials too. So I paid again for Prime. And again, the commercials follow. I can record movies on the TV platform I now use, and those at least permit me to fast-forward through the ads when I watch later. But not on Amazon Prime. So I have re-activated my old habits of planning snack or bathroom breaks around Amazon’s commercials instead of when it is convenient for me. Oh wait – Amazon will allow me to skip the commercials, if I pay for a new higher tier of Prime. But I know the drill – soon enough there will be commercials on that one too, in combination with a still-higher subscription level which will allow me to avoid them. Grumble.
Number 6 – Apps That Download Themselves Onto My Phone. My cell phone is getting old. When I got it, it had an impressive amount of memory. Now, I get warnings that the memory is inching closer to full, so that I periodically need to find things to delete. Which is why I get irritated when I scroll through my phone’s apps and discover three or four new games that 1) I did not know were there and 2) I would not play even if I had known about them. So once every couple of months I have to scroll through the apps to find those I have not invited to be there.
My phone is crowded enough with apps that seemed like a good idea at the time, but which I have not used. Like the loyalty apps for restaurants or businesses that I visit only occasionally. Or things that seemed so useful (like the app that makes your phone substitute for a carpenter’s level) but which I almost never use. Those are the apps that make me wonder if they still justify taking up space in my phone’s memory. But the self-downloaded stupid games? It is easy enough to delete them, but I shouldn’t have to.
I think that is enough for today. I intend to keep making my list, and perhaps I will be back with another installment when my list reaches critical mass (again). So how about all of you – do any of these things irritate you too? Or maybe you can add to the list.
J. P.'s Blog 
So relatable, although our tier of Paramount Plus avoids the commercials…so far. That will undoubtedly change.
One I will add to the list is drivers who camp out in the left lane (thinking of four-lane divided facilities) and travel at or below the speed limit. Or drivers, also on multi-lane divided highways, who pass you and re-enter your lane only to immediately slow down, requiring me to either match their lower speed or pass them.
No doubt I will think of more examples throughout the day.
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I think Paramount Plus might be the only paid television platform to which we do not have a subscription. I don’t think I will mention this to the Mrs., or we may be on that one too.
Oh yes, the people who cannot maintain a speed, especially after they pass you. I have been known to bury the throttle and put about a half mile between me and one of those people, just to get away from them. In my car, of course. My truck has adaptive cruise, which slows me down when traffic ahead of me slows. Now there is an irritant – looking down at my speedometer and seeing that I am following a car that is going 57 mph when I can run 65. Grumble.
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All valid annoyances! Poor expressway lane mergers are a special kind of hell. You’ve never seen anything until you’ve seen suburban Washington D.C. “Karens” actually stopping at the bottom of the ramp and waiting for a hole in the traffic instead of merging! Wha?
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My limited experience with traffic in the northeast makes me glad to be a midwesterner!
You remind me of a uniquely midwestern gripe – the nice lady (almost always a lady) who has the right of way, but stops and motions other drivers through. Even when I am that other driver.
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You are correct…and those people are responsible for countless accidents. I’ve seen real accidents and near misses with people doing that, while frustrated drivers behind them are passing them on the right, t-boning right into the turning car they waved through. Say what you will about the east coast, but I never had to second guess if someone was going to do the “neighborly” thing while driving: they most certainly were NOT, and you drove accordingly.
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Yup, these ones all get to me as well. I particularly despise the “commercials on services that you subscribe to” thing. That one is pure and simple corporate arrogance.
I actually was thinking about your #4 (the merging thing) the other day as it seems like this persistent problem has become even more problematic in the past several years…and I’ve started to notice something. I think that the proliferation of collision avoidance systems on cars has exacerbated this issue for a number of drivers. I’ve noticed people in the merge lane (who I’m passing as they avoid merging) driving with what looks like panic as little orange lights are flashing away in their driver’s side mirror and traffic whizzes past them in the right lane (to their left). I can only imagine that inside their car some kind of buzzer or chime is also going off furiously. OK, the technology is doing what it’s programmed to do, but the human behind the wheel ought to be skilled enough to realize when it’s ok to ignore the warnings, turn their head, look, speed up/slow down, and proceed to merge. I wonder though if for a particular set of nervous or low-skilled drivers the warning system simply increases their cognitive overload and they effectively shut down.
Add to that maybe a phone conversation, and a chattering GPS…and well, driver overload for sure. At least that’s my current theory.
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My wife and I dropped Amazon Prime six months ago. We did this because of the ads on Amazon’s music and movies/series channels. Those channels didn’t contain ads until about four years ago. Now you have to pay extra to get them ad-free. Anyway, we got tired of those policies, and didn’t want to pay extra. So, goodbye to Amazon. Bezos doesn’t need our money!
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Where’s Andy Rooney when you need him? Oh wait, we have you now! 😄
I’ll respond to each of these in turn:
2. I often don’t know exactly when bills are due. I wait ’til I get a few of them, then log on to my online bill pay and pay them all at once. The dates are far enough in advance that my payments are not late.
3. The problem is, sometimes certain items on the menu are not available. There’s a funny W.C. Fields sketch about this.
4. Merging is hard–both for the merge-er and the traffic being merged into. So go with the flow, merge and let people merge with love and compassion. Believe it or not, I’m writing this from New Jersey!
5. I don’t watch Amazon Prime movies, so I don’t know about this. I do find YouTube commercials annoying, but it least you can skip most of them. Same phenomenon: YouTube used to be ad-free. Capitalism, baby!
6. My phone is old (2016), and I haven’t noticed this automatic download problem. I do notice that sometimes I have to delete pictures to free up space. I only delete ones that I’ve uploaded to other sources.
Now I could tell you about 6 little things that irritate me, but that might annoy you. 🙂
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4. I can’t remember where I first read or heard it, but if drivers follow the “zipper” approach to merging (especially in construction zones) things can go much more smoothly.
I try to anticipate merges and move over whenever possible. On a multilane highway I’ll even move into the left lane so that drivers in the right lane can move into the middle.
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Amazon Prime – almost exactly why I signed up for it a long time ago. And it’s exactly the thing that made it not worth it to me to keep paying for it. Which means I’m actively looking for other vendors to supply me with whatever it is I’m looking for. And when I do have to get it from Amazon, they deliberately slow track the shipping so it’s a week off. This is the same “Eff You, Customer” attitude YouTube has and why I will never stop going to great lengths to block ads on that platform: I do not intend to reward these companies for extortion. I’m sort of curious now if I watch something on my PC with the ad-blocking browser whether I’ll have to deal with ads on Prime…
The inability of Car Pointers to merge is not a Your-State Affliction. It’s just simply The Way, I think. The courtesy of moving over to let them on has evolved into an entitlement mindset, and they are unable to comprehend they don’t have right of way to the lane they’re merging into (and this isn’t limited to simply getting on the freeway — it also applies to lane changes in general).
This was a fun topic. I’m willing to Get-Off-My-Lawn with you again in the future, should you do another one.
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#3 – reminded me of a meme I posted a while back:
“A Vampire pauses as it is about to enter a person’s house, and says: “Can I come in?”
The lady of the house replies: “I don’t know, can you?”
Cursing quietly, the vampire backs away, foiled yet again by the English teacher’s pedantry.”
Things that irritate me: Ads that are inserted between paragraphs of many things on the web now. People who vote for politicians who promise to make them better off financially which they do by taxing someone else more to pay for it.. the Canadian Government. People who drop off their problem animals in our community (cats, squirrels and raccoons.) People who blame ‘climate change’ for just about everything. Encountering the strongest force on earth, which is the one that holds empty, stacked rubbermaid containers or buckets together. Trying to get the lid off a new jar of peanut butter. Trying to read the tiny print directions on any bottle or box that comes from the drug store.
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