In the past 24 hours, the following things have annoyed the living shit out of me:
1) Line jumpers. I'm at Walmart, obtaining motivational materials (read: candy and cream stuffed doughnuts) and waiting in a long line for the express lane. Some tard (let's call him Pablo) runs up with a 24 pack of Bud Light, bypasses the line, and parks himself as the next to be checked out, charming the checkout lady with a line that sounded like "Aposté que sus labios prueban como la manteca de cerdo de la cereza!" I couldn't hear what he said when his female companion came over and started chewing him out over his statement, also carrying a large box of beer.
This is very peevesome. A quick evaluation reveals that not only is his immigration status in doubt (perhaps his documentation is inadequate) but he's spent time in a correctional facility...the spit and pencil tattoos of crudely drawn cobwebs and emo tears are a positive sign that someone has spent some time in county jail at a minimum. Undoubtedly he merely served his time in jail, and didn't learn a thing about basic human decency. I'll bet the 20 he used to pay for the beer was the proceeds from some crime or another.
2) Customers who don't know their hole from an ass in the ground. I could write several tomes on this subject, but today's peeve is quite simple; there are people out there who cannot master the technology they are leasing, and think the internet is some sort of profit pipe and if it isn't connected at all times, thousands of local currency units are lost every minute.
It starts first with the idea that you take a server, upload something to the thing and craft a webpage, and people will then come visit and pat lots of money for your crudely formatted content. When the money doesn't happen, obviously it is because the service I provide is defective, there's too much latency in the network, the default packages installed on the server are inadequate for their needs.
In my personal opinion, and this is not the opinion of the company I work for, entirely too many people live in countries where there is entirely inadequate telecommunications infrastructure. I am almost certain that Turkey has a single cable, with four untwisted and frayed copper wires, running across the Bosporus and into Greece where it plugs into a more modern switch. I have been besieged by sob stories about why we need to vastly exceed our scope of support and craft a moneymaking website, because the entire village has forked over their life savings to lease this Celeron based server, so they can use the profits to purchase a pump for the village well, and the shared laptop they have in the thatched roof hut just isn't up to the task of programming AJAX based applications. (If we could be making websites that generated obscene profits, we'd be in the business of doing exactly that, after all)
3) Shock absorber mounts. I understand the risks of buying a used car, hell, it is an elementary observation that on average, a used car will be a crappy car. (Why? Glad you asked. In any market where the seller has more information on a the product than the buyer, a rational choice by the buyer is to assume that the product is average, especially if the seller is not forthcoming with complete information on the product. Since buyers will only accept an average price for an average product, sellers with superior products won't be able to sell at the higher price that the buyer won't accept. This actually gives an incentive for the sellers of poorer products to sell at the higher average price, therefore, the market will be filled with more products that are below average! Which is absurd, a mathematical impossibility, but you get the point.) Anyway, the car isn't bad, there's just little things that need fixating. I'm almost finished with all the fixes, this last one involved two bits of machined metal and rubber, which the shock absorbers fit snugly. And now, the car doesn't rattle, which earlier this morning annoyed me, but not anymore. The ride is quite smooth.
4) $1.35 for a 16 ounce bottle of Mr Pibb. Almost FIVE BUCKS for a pack of cheese filled hot dogs. FIVE DOLLARS! I remember when they were two fifty, the price has doubled in 10 years. How is that? Seeing this sort of thing makes me wonder if we shouldn't have a period of deflation, just to bring bacon prices down.
