Posted today for your amusement/irritation, to be updated as necessary on future occasions.
People who walk up escalators
…especially when they ask you to move out of the way. Seriously – go take the fracking stairs, Sporty. I’m using the escalator for a reason. I don’t come over to your treadmill at the gym and hit the stop button. Don’t pester me to move on the escalator.
Passive Aggressive Bloggers
I’ve already written at length about this.
When someone paints over wallpaper
I’m invariably on the wrong end of this phenomenon – the “trying to take the paper off the wall later” end. It blows. Just buck up and remove the wallpaper first, lazybutt, for the good of humanity. Yeah, I’m talking to former house residents.
Sci-fi or Fantasy fiction novelists who deliberately don’t wrap up major plot points so they have a built in sequel(s)
There’s nothing more irritating than a deliberately unfinished story. Like I’m going to give you more cash for keeping me waiting. Just because every other writer in the genre writes a trilogy that turns into 10 volumes doesn’t mean you have to. Especially if, like Robert Jordan, they might die before they finish the series.
This is connected to another pet peeve – that practically all fantasy fiction is formulaic (farm boy turns hero, meets wizard, goes on long journey to dark mysterious mountains, defeats evil, discovers he’s really an orphan king, blah, blah, blah, Joseph Campbell, blah. Snooze).
The euphemisms “in the closet” and “outing”
I’ve written about this at length, too.
When a person uses a picture for their social networking profile that has more than one person in it.
I can’t tell if they’re trying to obscure who they are, if they’re trying to prove they have friends, or if they seriously don’t know how to crop a photo in this day and age. None of these potential explanations speaks well of them.
People who get shitty when I call my girlfriend on the cell phone from the store
Oh, I know, you’re probably one of those folks who’ve blogged about how irritating this is, so I’m probably just poking a stick right in you eye with this one, but I don’t give a shit. Get the hell over it. If there’s one time I absolutely need to call my girlfriend other than in an emergency, it’s in the damned grocery store. She’s standing next to the fridge and can tell me if we already have mustard or not. Please stop bitching about this; it’s the reason why cell phones were invented. God knows, we don’t need extra jars of mustard in our house, and although I’ve done due diligence and made a list, there’s always something I didn’t think of. I’m trying to be energy efficient in avoiding a return drive to the store.
Seriously, I don’t know what the effing problem with this is. If my girlfriend were with me in the store, I’d turn around and ask her if we needed mustard. Would you object to this, too? You just don’t like to hear people talking in the store? And if that doesn’t bother you, why does it make a difference if I’m calling her instead of talking to her next to me? You just don’t like me having a conversation with a person invisible to you?
One common bitch about this seems to be “people just aren’t present anymore; they’re preoccupied with something going on somewhere else.” Sorry to burst your bubble, Narcissus, but before cellphones, my mind wasn’t present with you when I was shopping, anyway. I was probably daydreaming about riding a unicorn in Narnia, actually. What kills me is that we have this same conversation with every new piece of technology. People said shit like this back when they invented the telegraph: “oh, woe, people just don’t write letters to one another anymore.” Try and keep up, grandpa.
Yeah, I actually considered closing the comments on this post. I might still do it, so don’t be a jackass.
