Like anyone, I have a mental list of things that annoy the hell out of me. You might call them pet peeves. Everyone has them. Yours may be completely different than mine, or some may be similar. Pet peeves don’t really have much to do with any logical sense; they’re just things that bug us personally, sometimes for no good reason.
And then there are the big peeves. A lot of people would probably not admit to having any of these, but it’s my personal belief that everyone does. These are pet peeves on an enormous scale. These are the things that, even though they mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, just make you mad. I mean, seriously filled with unbridled rage. You know you’re overreacting, but you can’t help it. When these things occur, you have to grit your teeth and count to ten while you breathe to keep yourself from punching a hole through the wall. Other people think there’s something wrong with you for getting so worked up about something so meaningless, but you can’t help the way your heart starts to hammer and your eye starts to twitch. These are the things that make you wonder if you need anger management courses.
– A “pet” peeve in the literal sense, I can’t stand it when my cats wind around my feet and beg for food when there is still food in their bowls. I’m to understand that this is a common feline predicament…they just can’t seem to be able to stand the fact that a tiny section of the bottom of their bowl is showing. But knowing that other cats are the same way does not help. This phenomenom enrages me. Every time my cats follow me around, begging for food, mewing and whining and trying their damnedest to trip me, and I subsequently see that 80% of the bowl is still full, I want to kick the cats as hard as I can. I don’t, of course, because I’m not a lunatic, but that’s how this kitty attitude toward partly-empty bowls makes me feel. On several occasions I’ve flat-out refused to give them any more food until the bowls were completely empty, I guess just because I wanted to annoy them as much as they were annoying me.
– I’m not a road rage kind of person, but there are two driver-related actions that make me want to scream. One is when people refuse to use their blinkers while turning. It’s really not a difficult action and I can’t for the life of me understand why so many people flat-out refuse to do it. The blinker is right there, two inches away from where your hands (presumably) are on the steering wheel. You can literally reach out with your pinky finger and flick the handle in the right direction. It takes a quarter of a second of work and absolutely no brain power. Nothing frustrates me more when I’m out on the road than when I’m waiting for a car to be out of my way only to have it turn before it reaches me, sans blinker. Except, possibly, this other thing frustrates me a little more: people who (blinker or no) take half the damn day to make a turn. No, I’m not in a rush, and no, it’s not really affecting my day in any meaningful way, but if I’m a hundred meters down the road when you start to turn and I end up having to come to a dead stop to wait for you to finish your turn, that seriously makes me want to speed up and push you wherever the hell you’re trying to go. Turns do not hurt your car, people. You can take them at a little faster than 0.5 miles/hour.
– As much as anyone, I enjoy sharing things I like on social media. I’ll share a funny video I found, or an interesting news article, and sometimes – just sometimes – I’ll even share an inspirational message of some kind. But something that fills me with an indecent level of fury is when I see a post of any kind that involves the words “most of you won’t even read this” or “let’s see who cares enough to share”. The second I see these words, or any variation of, I immediately hate whatever your post is about. It could be about saving baby puppies from being tossed in a wood chipper, but the second you try to guilt me into sharing, or somehow suggest that I’m a bad person if I don’t share, I immediately delegate your post to the junk pile. If I care about a topic, I’ll share it in various other ways, but I refuse to share something that I’ve been bullied into sharing. It makes me genuinely angry that people think that this method is the best way to get their message out there.
– Toys of any kind that require assembly and subsequently do not assemble properly. As an adult who enjoys a few guilty-pleasure-type collectibles, this is something that frustrates me. As a mother who has now had to assemble many playthings, this is something that makes me want to punch toy manufacturers in the throat. When I used to collect Todd McFarlane Dragons it would bug the hell out of me when a tail refused to click in properly, or when the dragon was designed in such a way that it literally could not stand up, because believe it or not some of us actually like to open and display our collectibles instead of leaving them trapped in plastic for all time. Now that I’m a mother and am regularly assembling toys for my daughter, this annoyance has reached an all-time high of animosity toward toy-makers. I have an entire box on the top shelf of my daughter’s closet, full to the brim with pieces from toys that I had to put away because they refused to stay together and will just end up lost otherwise. Can someone please tell me why Master Splinter’s tail comes packaged as a separate piece? There is absolutely no good reason for his tail to ever need to be detached, and yet it comes in the package as a separate piece that all the super-glue in the world can not keep together.
We all have our things that bother us in a fist-clenching, tooth-grinding, eye-twitching kind of way. These are a few of mine. What about you?
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