Pet Hate #56

I have a rather largish living room, half of which is kinda the designated ‘study’ area, so it’s where I have my desk and my PC.  Which means, I can hear when emails come in or when someone ‘pings’ on the MSN (and by ‘ping’ i mean – sends a message to see if you get a response).  Not surprisingly, many of my friends and relatives will use the IM to contact me if I’m online rather than using the landline or the mobile phone as it often gets my attention just as easily as a phone call but doesn’t cost diddly.

But i absolutely hate it when someone ‘pings’  me on the MSN, seemingly with the intention (I would have thought) of starting a conversation and then they promptly fuck off!!   if you ‘pinged’ me, I figure you must with to converse about something – so come on then…. converse!!  Mostly it pisses me off because I will respond to the IM as I would to a phone call – I’ll often stop what I’m doing and come see what you want.
 
So while I love the MSN and find it very convenient and useful and if you wanna chat, then great, I’ll come and chat with you. But don’t fuckin’ rattle my cage as though you’ve got something to say and then bugger off for an indeterminate period of time… that’s just rude.  😐

  

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I may have made a tactical error…

It’s finally the other side of Christmas and normally this means we can all draw a deep breath and expel a huge sigh of relief that it’s all over…. or at least we could if we’d exercised some level of sound judgment during the present purchasing process.  For it seems I have committed one of the cardinal sins of gift giving, and have given someone in my own household a Noisy Gift.

We’ve all done it in the past – handed over to Someone Else’s Child a gift with such annoyingly noisy attributes as to warrant the destruction of a longterm friendship or perhaps even so terrible as to cause one’s own relatives to disown you!  But never… never .. should one purchase a Noisy Gift for someone who resides in close proximity to yourself.  What on earth was I thinking?  If indeed I was actually, you know… thinking per se.  For I have bought THE Noisy Gift from hell into my home.  Well no I can’t back that it… it weren’t actually ‘from Hell’ as it were… it came from Think Geek to be precise, but it may as well have come from Hell.  😐

I had wracked my brain for something to buy for Mr K this year, and normally I end up buying him something that he and Angel can do together, and this year I was thinking on a similar track when I purchased this for them:

 

Yes that’s right, I bought them what I knew they would think was the coolest toy ever a little remote control Mario Kart complete with Nintendo like controller!!!   But I obviously didn’t think this through so well, because it also comes (and here’s the unfortunate bit) complete with sound effects from the game!!!   Yay!  😐  Sound effects that spew out of the thing at uncontrollable volume from itty bitty little low quality speakers. 

Shit.
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Go Santa, it’s your birthday!

Grocery shopping today… dropped $270 and I’m pretty sure there was scant little ‘real’ food in the trolley.  Mostly it was all just stocking up on holiday snackage.  Now I hate grocery shopping at the best of times, but there’s a number of things that can make it worse…

Christmas Carols playing over the PA system.  Urgh!  From what I understand there’s been significant research done in the field of environmental psychology in retailing and the effect of certain musical stimuli on the customers.  And I have a sneaking suspicion that Christmas Carols must have scored pretty high for them to be hammering them ad infinitum they way they do.  I hate Christmas Carols.  Hate them in the shopping centres, hate them in office elevators, hate them in fucking carols by candlelight bullshit…. they’re so hackneyed and played to death, please stop torturing us this way.

Supermarket brand hogging.
  I went looking for smoked oysters today to add to my cheese and nibblies plates for tomorrow, and was disgusted to find that the only brand available was John West.  There used to be several brands of smoked oysters available at my local Coles supermarket… Brunswick Smoked Oysters and Always Fresh Smoked Oysters and a Coles Own Brand.  But now, all we get is the option of John West or John West smoked oysters… which is fucked, cos they were always dearer and for a much smaller package. 

People congregating in the aisles.  I don’t know why, but either people enjoy shopping with a bunch of their friends and relatives or the supermarkets are the real world equivalent of  fucking chat rooms where you can run into a pick up conversation and just decide to be a part of it, but it seems that you’re constantly trying to navigate your predictably dodgy trolley through small knots of people.  What the fuck are they talking about anyway?  Deep and meaningfuls about cheese or something?

Strangers feeling compelled to talk to you.  ‘Excuse me dear, but are these the spinach and ricotta triangles that are on special?”  Well lady, I don’t know do they match the description on the little tag telling you they’re on special?  As if I give a fuck.. oh wait ricotta and spinach huh?  Hmmm they sound good.. I might have some of those.

Everything’s been moved… Again.  Yes, they have to move everything around for the Christmas nonsense.  Not sure why they do this as it seems they have some irregular stuff going on all year round… New Years party goods, Valentines day Chocolates etc, Easter Egg stuff, Mothers day Stuff, and so on and so on.  Why don’t they just have one aisle dedicated to whatever the hell people are being conned into this week, and leave everything else out of it?  Why do they have to shuffle every product in the entire store when they bring in the product lines that are dedicated to what ever is being celebrated at that point in time?  I hate not being able to find stuff  🙁

Check out Boys.  Never!  Never!  And I can’t stress this enough… NEVER line up behind a check out that has a boy working the register.  For if you do, I guarantee you will regret it.  Your dishwashing detergent will be in the same bag as your bananas, your eggs will be packed under tins of dog food, and your tampons will be thrown in with your cheese.  For reasons beyond my limited understanding, boys can’t pack groceries for shit!  Even though I fastidiously separate all my cold things into one section on the conveyor belt, and then the hard items and then the fresh items etc… if there’s a boy working the checkout… forget it.  I might as well let Angel pack the groceries.

So even if you manage to get a trolley that goes relatively straight, and there’s no Christmas carols playing, and a decided lack of strangers annoying you and the store manager was too lazy to move all your favorite products around that week… even under those optimal conditions, grocery shopping still sucks…. prices are up, quantities are down…. and you still find yourself checking the fucking eggs which is a depressing reminder of just how mundane our lives are.

Merry Christmas all… can’t wait for it to be over.


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Hurry up and Wait…

In order to avoid what I was certain was going to be an positively unbearable Mr K on election day, I had arranged to head off up to the Eumundi Markets for the day with 

.  So far so good.  And in order to beat the traffic, get up there in a goodly time frame and (importantly) be able to find a park not too far away from the action, we agreed to meet at my place at 7am for the approx 2 hour trip.  

So much for that!  I waited and waited.  And eventually my patience wore a little thin, so I called him at 0745 to see where he was.  Asleep apparently..   🙁   He’d slept through his alarm and well… that shit me to tears.   So he said, I’ll grab a quick shower and be there in 10mins.  Okay.  So I sat and I waited, and I wonder how fucking long is ten minutes anyway, and he eventually turned up around 0830!!

But the whole time I was waiting, I was literally sitting there trying my hardest not to get pissed off about waiting.  It’s not that big a deal, we didnt really have any pressingly urgent agenda to deal with once we got where we were going… so why was I getting so pissed off?!?!?  I don’t know.  But I just know I hate being kept waiting unnecessarily.  I mean I really fucking hate being kept waiting … for anything really.  And when I am being kept waiting it’s like I’m unable to help myself but to focus all my dislike of ever having been kept waiting on that one presently occuring occasion.  And I get more and more angsty, and more and more pissed off as the minutes tick by.  And even though I promise myself I am not going to gob off in an overtly snarky manner at the first opportunity when they turn up…  I always do!

Cant help myself – I have to go and spew vitriole all over the place or I end up carrying it around all day. 

For the record, I did get over myself, the drive was pleasant, the markets were fun, frivolous purchases were had by all and nary a comment about elections to be found!
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Me and cars don’t mix.

Three hours ago… someone killed my little car.  🙁

I was minding my own business driving home from work, and some silly bint in an expensive Mazda RX8 ploughed straight into the arse end of my poor little car likely killing it forever.  I hate hate hate idiot drivers.  An I hate to admit that I reckon most of them are stupid dumb bint women.  So that makes four.

Four accidents I’ve been involved in.

First one – a nasty cab driver who said he didn’t see me and failed to give way, pulled out in front of me and we ploughed right into him.  Second one, in Lismore on Christmas Eve and some idiot in a panel van was on my side of the road at the crest of a hill on a country highway and we smashed head on at approx 80-100kph.  And then the third one where I was in a car that rolled into a ditch on a gravel highway in Tasmania.

And now today, where the silly bint in her flashy Mazda drove up my arse and smooshed me into the car in front, so I got sandwiched in between.  I have a sneaking suspicion that I aint gonna feel so good in the morning.  😐

As if my poor chronically whiplashed back weren’t bad enough as it was …..

fucking wanker bad driver car crash accident

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