3 May 2022

Annoyances

Fly-tipping I encountered on Saturday's walk - see Annoyance Number 2

My personal psychiatrist, Dr Clint Hyundai, who graduated with honours from The University of  Ulsan in South Korea  a few years back, has given me a homework task as part of my therapy. He asked me to make a comprehensive list of  all the things that annoy me.

I protested that I would be writing that list forever if I tried to cover absolutely everything. "Okay," he said, "just write down ten things that immediately come to mind. You can put them in your blog if you wish."

So here goes...

  1. The sight of  people putting their feet up on seats - say on a bus or in a pub or a cinema. Don't they know that someone else will sit there before long? You never know what dirt you might have picked up on your shoes.
  2. Fly-tipping in the countryside. When anti-social numbskulls drive to isolated locations and dump their detritus - be it household rubbish or a builder's waste. There's no need for this and who the hell do they think is going to clear up their rubbish?
  3. Single use plastics and overuse of plastic in packaging. It is about time that manufacturers became a whole lot more responsible about their use of plastic. Tragically, the planet already suffers far too much from plastic waste. At times it seems as if we are drowning in plastic.
  4. Scam phone calls and e-mails. Over the years I think I have done well to sniff out this criminality and have never fallen into any scammers' traps. Linked to this, I wonder why governments and other forces of the law are not doing more to block scammers and bring them to justice. That's annoying too.
  5. Inappropriate use of smartphones. This includes parents checking out their phones when they should be focused on their little sons and daughters. It also covers people being glued to their personal phones in workplaces - and, based on my recent hospital visits, that includes nurses in hospitals!
  6. Taxis. I said taxis, not taxes! So many taxi drivers seem to think that they should rule the roads when many of their driving habits are terrible. Pulling out from junctions causing other drivers to brake heavily, undertaking, not using their indicators, stopping at unsuitable places, honking their horns and doing U turns. Very annoying.
  7. Queue jumping. Most British people understand the unspoken rules of queuing and waiting your turn very well indeed but occasionally you encounter queue jumpers whose selfishness is infuriating. The other day I had to wait several minutes for a bus to arrive. I was first in the queue. I put my arm out to stop the bus but a young woman with headphones attached to her mobile phone jumped in front of me. I said "Excuse me!" quite loudly but her headphones were blocking out all extraneous noise.
  8. Belts that don't work or don't last. Maybe this is to do with the shape of my body but I am always having trouble with belts.  I want them to keep my trousers up and help to keep my shirts tucked in and I don't want the surface layer to disintegrate within a month of the purchase date either. Is that too much to ask for?
  9. TV commercials that break up one's concentration on a programme or film. In Britain, I guess we are quite lucky because our BBC channels contain no intermittent advertising whatsoever. I like it that way but if I happen to be watching a commercial channel, those interruptions are really very irritating.
  10. Careless parking. In particular, I am thinking here about the grass verge outside our house. For thirty three years I have striven to keep it green. I mow it. I repair it. I have painted half a dozen bricks white and placed them on the kerb stones but still we have problems with idiots parking on the verge. It's worst in winter when the verge is softer and the grass is dormant. Linked with this, I am also annoyed about the grass cutting contractors who turn up every so often and do an awful, cursory job - often scalping the grass with their unsuitable sit-on mowers.
Well, I was just getting warmed up there. I could easily have churned out a hundred more annoyances.  Perhaps you share one or two of my complaints or maybe you would like to add a pet grievance of your own. 

As Dr Clint often says in his counselling sessions, "It's good to get it off your chest!"

40 comments:

  1. That is a good list, Neil, and I agree with you! I am bothered by litter, too, and can't stand to see garbage scattered about when I am hiking in a forest preserve or walking around the neighborhood. Some people are pigs!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am no saint Ellen but I can honestly say that I have never dropped a piece of litter in my life.

      Delete
  2. Ooh, now this is a subject that will run and run. I was going to add my own contribution but would probably not be able to stop once I got started.

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    Replies
    1. How about idiots walking on to your property to see the graves?

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  3. That really is an eyesore, isn't it? (in the photo) Here people usually use the woods for their illegal dumping so it is hard to catch them in the act. The tipping fee at the landfill is quite high, but I'm not sure if it's the expense or just laziness that makes people dump illegally.

    My list is very long but I find it takes too much energy to get worked up about much of anything lately except cruelty or neglect of vulnerable people and animals.Those aren't really annoyances anyway, they're outrages.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. An outrage is far more significant than a mere annoyance.

      Delete
  4. Love the list, and completely agree!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sounds like you are well on your way to becoming that crotchety old man... just like I am.

    By the way, I had the same grievance with belts until I found these, though for you, there is probably a fair amount added on to ship them overseas.

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QRG14W3

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A Bullhide Belt might do the job but I'm thinking braces - or what Americans call suspenders!

      Delete
  6. I agree with all of those although I had never heard the expression fly tipping before. We have an issue with that here also. Taxis aren't a problem in my suburban area though.

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    Replies
    1. Maybe Americans simply call fly-tipping dumping! Here dumping can mean having a poo.

      Delete
  7. Queue jumping really annoys me. For the others you list some don't bother me much like annoying TV commercials. Putting feet on a seat certainly annoys me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think of you, rightly or wrongly, as a pretty easy-going guy.

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  8. People who lie.
    People who bully.
    People who don't deal with their own shit, who just walk away and expect somebody else to deal with it.
    The list is too extensive at this time sadly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Reading your blog for ages now, I am well aware of your main annoyances Nurse Lily.

      Delete
  9. We were right with you on the first 5 (although we'd put no 3 at the top). At lot of them are about lack of respect or thought for others and JayCee blogged about that recently ...about people who thought respect for property and others was outdated.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I night be turning into my parents but I don't care.

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  10. #8, buy a good quality leather belt, full grain leather if you can, it should last longer. Braces might also help as you said to ed.
    I hate the fly tippers too.
    A personal grievance here is the tenants who no longer bother to put their bins away after the truck has collected the rubbish. The bins get left on the footpath so the postie on is bike has to swerve around them to get to the mailboxes and they don't seem to care.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Please send me a full grain Australian belt for my birthday nice Ms River.

      Delete
  11. Vacuum cleaners, politicians, speeding cars, nuclear weapons, no public transport, councils not providing litter bins and referees not giving penalties. These some of my grievance things.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh I should have put vacuum cleaners on my list. And another thing that annoys me is people who do not compile their lists of annoyances correctly and miss stuff out.

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  12. People all around me are always complaining that I'm not sure I should add anything. It is mostly about late trains and buses. Rubbish in the countryside is wicked but it is probably better than it was 40 or 50 years ago. Also, councils are already coming round to sowing wild seeds in the grass verges, and of course the cry has gone up to stop mowing lawns and getting rid of dandelions because of insects and bees ;)
    Perhaps the human race is an arch complainer but in the end we solve the problems?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well the human race had better get on with solving climate change before it's too darned late. Interesting that you perceive the rubbish in the countryside issue used to be worse. That is certainly not my perception Thelma.

      Delete
  13. Taxis and belts don't bother me, but I've in complete agreement about the rest of your list, though not necessarily in that order. Plastics and litter would be top of my list, followed by inappropriate use of smart phones, scam calls, fly tipping and TV commercials - and some of the voices "over"!
    I'm sure I could find many to add to your list if I thought about it for a while!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Carol. The list was in no particular order of significance.

      Delete
  14. I go along with a lot of what you've listed too. Incorrect grammer is another. You would of thought they tort kids that stuff in skool. Its appalling apalling appaling.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. stood or standing? sat or sitting? amount or number?

      When it comes to language use, there are many annoyances to register.

      Delete
  15. People who don't pick up after their dog or worse still, they pick it up and hang the bag in a tree!

    People who pick wildflowers.

    People who speak one day and pretend they haven't seen you another.

    Junk mail.

    Scam callers

    That's just a few.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glad to see that "People from Yorkshire" did not make your list Christina!

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  16. Anonymous1:14 pm

    Not seen of late...I wonder why, but spitting in public is one.
    Feeding pigeons, another pest species from your country.
    At every set of traffic lights there is a stop line and that is where you stop. Not metres back, not two metres forward over the pedestrian crossing, but at the stop line.

    I could be here all night but I will leave it at that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We sent pigeons over to keep a watchful eye over behaviour and morality in our distant colony.

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    2. Anonymous12:36 pm

      Both behaviour monitoring and morality monitoring may have worked but they were not a deterrent.

      Delete
  17. Clint is very wise- good to get all of this off your chest. Unfortunately, it won't change a thing. People can be assholes. That is the reality of it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think of the saying "One man's meat is another man's poison". This could evolve into "One man's asshole is another man's saviour". I guess we are all assholes occasionally.

      Delete
  18. A lot of things irritate me, but it does no good to get them off my chest. All I can do is try to keep things in perspective. But Ms. Moon is right. People can be assholes. I try to remember that I'm one of them.

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    Replies
    1. Surely not you as well Debby!

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    2. True story. As much as I try not to be, sometimes I discover...shock of shocks...that I have been an asshole.

      Delete
  19. Replies
    1. Ms Moon tends to see things clearly.

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  20. I was just thinking about fly tipping the other day and, while I'm quite sure it happens here, I've never actually seen it where I live in France. One of my pet hates, though, is older children in shopping trolleys. God knows what they have on their shoes and then we get to put our food purchases on top of it!

    ReplyDelete

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