Things I Hate

It seems there's a glut of "lists" kicking around at the moment...

Things I Want To Do Before I Die
Things I Like About Myself
Things I Would Change If I Could
People I'd Like To Meet
You know... there's a long list of them.

I thought I'd start a list of things that piss me off. Not BIG things... just little things that, mostly, piss me off for a nonosecond before my life moves on. They're the sort of things you can really take some comfort from being pissed off about because a)you can't fix them, and b)it doesn't matter that you can't fix them even if you wanted to.

The first thing on the list is that really stupid set up before the punch line on 99% of jokes that arrive in my inbox. Come on... you know... they go something like this;

A blonde walks out to her mail box blah blah blah and
(You're gonna love this)
blah blah punchline.

Fuck off. I don't need whoever wrote the joke to tell me whether I'll like it or not. Make the bloody presumption. If it's a funny joke I'll laugh. It not, I wont. The author telling me I'm "gonna love it" isn't going to make the slightest difference to whether I do or not. In fact, I find it more than a little patronising.

I hate sports journalists referring to sports teams in the plural too. "Arsenal are playing Man U this weekend." No you Philistine. Arsenal IS playing Man U this weekend. Arsenal is one team. Singular. Saying it are playing would be like saying Chester are pissed off at illiterate journalists. For the purists, it's called a "collective singular", which simply means it's a singular term for a group of things. "Company" is a collective singular, and that includes a company name, so Nike IS just doing it. "Team", "church", and "country", are also collective singulars, and they too include organisational names. America are not looking for Bin Laden. America IS looking for Bin Laden. Would you say "The church are having a fete this weekend"? (Please... it's rhetorical question... if you felt a need to answer "yes", then perhaps you aren't ready for this blog.)

Next on my list would be those stupid web ads that go on and on and on for pages telling you how great a product is, such that you have to scroll ALL THE WAY to the bottom before you find the "order now" link, and you still don't know the price. Am I an idiot? Do they really think that just by clicking "order now" I'll buy it irrespective of the cost? Do they think the act of clicking "order now" signals some emotional commitment to purchase such that concepts like "value" and "trust" are no longer relevant?

I had one of these yesterday... it was a link in one of the health emails I get, a mostly useful daily that, this time, linked to a blathering web page about some "secret" forex trading system. Apparently, "only those in the know" have this secret and if I was very fast, the advertiser would share that secret with li'l ole me. It talked about "bank's secret codes" and "the secret only the true insiders know"... all without telling me the price. Ok. I'll bite. I clicked on "Order Now", and the price was $1,770 plus $9.95 postage and handling. Pffft!

Which leads me to the next thing... $9.95 postage and handling on a seventeen hundred dollar item. Fuck off. For $1,700, the postage had better be free. In fact, the bloody CDs it was trying to flog had better be hand delivered by semi naked virgins.

Then there's food labels. Don't get me started on the content... that's for another blog. I'm talking about the size. 4pt. Do you know how small 4pt actually is? It's so small that most people over 40 can't read it. What lame idiot bureaucrat set that standard? If the information the government wants on the label is so important, then at least make it big enought o read.

Trucks piss me off too, but only when they're going backwards. What is it with that "beep beep beep" sound? All right, I know it's a safety thing. I know it's only there because some moron probably walked behind a truck that was reversing, which meant some demented bureaucrat came up with the beep beep solution so he could tick a box the next time he did a site inspection.

But here's the problem... we have a construction site near my office. There's so much beep beep beeping coming from all directions that it would be impossible for anyone to know if they're about to be run over or not, which, of course, means no-one pays attention any more, thus rendering the beep beep beep totally useless. One piece of equipment has a beep beep beep so load I'm sure they can hear it in Auckland, which makes me wonder what they'll do for "safety" to replace the sound when everone within a city block of it goes deaf.

Get rid of those beepers, I say, and let natural selection take its course.