Each morning we all face a choice - pull the sheets up over our heads, stay in bed and wait till it's 100% safe to leave, or get up and confront the myriad threats to our sanity that exist out of our comfortable sleeping quarters. The brief few minutes (or hours, depending on whether you blowstyle your hair Dilla-style) between setting your foot down and stubbing your toe and reaching work late soaked cause you forgot an umbrella are a veritable minefield of anxiety, frustration and violent swearing. Many things can go wrong in these fleeting moments, but some will no doubt cause more irritation than others. From the freezing cold shower (fking plumbing) to the missed subway connection (stupid train operator), from the spent deodorant stick (wtf do people even sweat anymore) to the ipod with only 1% charge left (I swear I just charged it), from rain on your wedding day to a free ride when you are already late, we all face trials and tribulations that make us question whether or not the game is even worth playing. Each of these peeves will naturally affect some more than others, but I can think of one that is probably the most infuriating to all: the vast expenditure of the dry-cleaning-industrial complex in tools and obstacles preventing us from smoothly putting on the very clothes we paid it dearly to clean.1) Even before you get to the plastic, you have the twist ties that somehow are thinner than the human hair and more susceptible to being tangled. You spend five minutes twisting in one direction, only to realize that you are making the knot tighter. Then you switch direction, only to find that you are somehow still moving in the wrong direction. Eventually you get so frustrated you just try and tear it off, but all this does is remove the paper exterior, making it even harder to untangle.
2) The plastic packaging some dry cleaner's use is a miracle of modern science. No matter how much you try and ball it up to get rid of the crap, the relatively tiny mass of plastic somehow manages to expand and fill approximately 1 million times the volume of any other material. Even if you have only cleaned one shirt, no matter what the plastic will fill up the garbage can in your room immediately, and possibly spill out and fill up the entire room when you are not looking. That's if you are even able to get the plastic off in the first place.
3) The various tags/clips/plastic doodads/paper crap the dry cleaners use to identify your clothing will also clutter up your life and may or may not even be removable. The dry cleaner I currently use affixes one giant red tag and one smaller, more poofy green tag immediately under the red, both affixed to the label in the back right where that bone in your neck makes contact with the shirt. Instead of a simple mechanism to keep things attached, or the more conventional button hole based placement, this dry cleaner goes through great effort to use microscopic, sharp, prickly staples, thus ensuring that you will either only tear off part of the paper or the whole label. I don't want to say this method is equivalent to a vampire squid sucking at the face of humanity, but I imagine getting a vampire squid off the face of humanity would be easier than removing those goddamn staples.
4) I'll put this one simply. What the fck are you doing to my collar stays? Does the dry cleaning process involve something similar to what happen to the terminator at the end of Judgement Day? Why does it always come back looking roughly like an ampersand?
5) My last dry cleaning bill was $200.
What bothers you? :)
There is no possible way I can match the length, breadth, hilarity, and accuracy of TG's post, so I will go with quantity rather than quality:
ReplyDeleteThings that irk me during the morning session/commute:
-The impossibility of finding an alarm clock where the snooze button lets me sleep for an amount of time other than 9 more minutes. Who decided 9 minutes of sleep is better for me than 10 more minutes? GFY.
-Every single day, without miss, my roommate comments on what I'm eating (or not eating) for breakfast:
"Wow, dry toast? How's that working?"
"Oh Dan, no breakfast today?"
"So you're just gonna crack open a Diet Coke at 7 in the morning?"
Dude, I don't comment on the fact that you style your hair in a fauxhawk, so please STFU.
-Morning radio. I like music, and when I turn on the radio I want to listen to music and not some a**holes talking about celebrity gossip and remarking about how generally hilarious they are. The only radio dj who has ever made me laugh is Casey Kasem, and that's only because he made appearances on Saved by the Bell. Also STFU Howard Stern.
-Sunlight. Do I really need to install both blinds and curtains on my window in order to keep you out of my room in the morning? Why can't just blinds be enough? GFY sunlight.
-The phrase "Good Morning." Why can't a simple "hi" suffice, even if it is before 11 am? Can't you see I'm too tired to spit out 3 syllable sentences? Is it unfriendly for me to respond to "Good Morning" with a simple, forced smile, rather than echoing back "Good Morning"?
There are a million other things that piss me off during the day, I'm interested to hear some of yours.
I was going to get into something to the degree of granularity that you did, TG, but there is just so much that makes me hate the world that occurs on a daily basis that I feel it's just better to list it, and perhaps expand on it later. I will start from the beginning of an "average" work day to the end:
ReplyDelete1) WTF decided 9 minutes is the appropriate snooze time?
2) WTF likes AM DJ’s?? How is this a job? Who are the people that call in and why do they sound a) happier than me in general b) happy to be awake c) why are they allowed to procreate?
2) God forbid you sleep with the window open, you inevitably have the world's biggest mosquito bite on your ear
3) Why is it socially unacceptable to pee in the shower? As George Costanza once said, "they're all pipes!"
4) While I think there should be a more efficient card/turnstyle system designed, the guy that cuts you off to a stall only to not know which way to put the card in deserves to be pushed onto the tracks
5) In the morning, I am tired. I want to sit down. I don't care that you are elderly, a woman, or r*tarded. Finders Keepers.
6) WTF does the express wait for the local, to the extent that it waits for the doors to open, only to immediately close their doors and leave the people who want to transfer stranded? Granted, if I were a conductor, I’d do sht all day to mess with people, but my being the victim here makes it frustrating.
7) KY, guy with music too loud on subway. Yeah, we all love Panthera.
8) KY sweaty guy who leans over people.
9) Why, after a million mile walk of a commute, does my office not have the AC on? They know there’s no way anyone gets here without walking forever, after all they chose to move here AFTER the giant hole was put in, but would prefer that the employees sweat maniacally on the desk and force gross people to take their shoes off?
10) If I were train conductor conductor, I’d make it illegal for the local train to ever go faster than the express train. Logic will not be defied in MY Mass Transit Authority.
11) Why in the hell do some people tip when they get take out food? Just to make me feel bad?
12) How can a delivery guy ever come without change and get mad at you if you refuse to tip him a $20?
13) KY people standing randomly in the subway with no purpose or direction, ruining the Feng Shui.
14) Honestly, I’m a healthy young man. Opening the door for me makes me feel a) awkward b) dainty and c) like you’re going to say something about me after I pass through. I can open my own door. Stop judging me, Doorman.
Have many, many more but I just want to get this going.
While the 9 minute snooze on my IPOD pisses me off (my old cell was adjustable), I accept it by considering that it really presents unlimited multiples of 9 (which is why I'm persistently late for work). Otherwise:
ReplyDelete1. Why would a company locate itself in the suburbs? I can't answer that question to begin with. Apparently we had a survey before I started and voted to STAY here. But that means a 25 mile reverse commute.
2. I hope General Dwight D. Eisenhower, if he were alive, would come to Chicago and personally beat the transportation commission with his shoe for applying his name to the I-290 "Expressway", which averages 20 MPH for most of the day thanks to its ingenious use of both left-side and right-side exits, decision not to replace potholes, and service trucks driving down the road at 5 MPH after forgetting to turn off the giant blinking arrow attached to their back.
3. Precipitation. I like to ski. On mountains. And it looks nice in the park. I also recognize rain is needed for some sort of Photosynthesis process that I probably learned at one point in HS. But I'm not about to carry an umbrella, so stay the hell off of me.
4. Security. My urban sprawl office has now decided that, despite forcing most employees to park behind and to the sides of it, all employees will have to come through the front door (where a receptionist pays no attention to you), lest theives steal our dry erase markers.
5. Conference Room Naming Conventions. Every office has its own way of trying to make bland rooms sound interesting. None ever help you to know where the room is. If it's going to be useless, why not go a little more interesting, like naming them after pornstars or Cannoball Run II characters.
1) 9 minute snooze -- Don't legislate my life. I want an adjustable snooze.
ReplyDelete2) Naming things after forgotten people. Throgs Neck Bridge, Storrow Drive, Major Deegan. Let's start naming them after people alive when my grandparents were still having s_x.
3) I don't dry clean that often, but agree that it shows up with a veritable Gordian Knot of doo-dads, plastic, foam shoulder protectors, etc. It's my Brothers B button down shirt, not my Sergeant Pepper or Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation jacket. It doesn't need a wastebasket worth of trash.
4) Getting carded - we have 2 security guards. I know them both. I've brought them coffee. I noticed when one got promoted and had another stripe. They both comment on my morning music choices, but they still need to not only SEE my ID card, but handle it. I'm not a T-1000 searching for John Connor. You know who I am. In the words of Mark Wahlberg in 'Fear,' "LET ME INTO THE HOUSE."
5) Parking -- if you park like a dooooosh-nozzle, it should be socially acceptable to key car, deflate tire, slash tire, smash window and torch car in that order of merit for the magnitude of dooooosh-nozzlery.
6) EZ Pass -- if you ride the EZ Pass lane under the guise of having EZ Pass, only to try and cut into the cash lane at the last minute, it should be tolerated, nay encouraged, for inconvenienced drivers to fire an RPG at your car or spray your car door with bullets.
7) Drive-thru -- it's Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's. They don't serve sushi or steak tartar. The fact that they even still have a menu board is insulting to the filthy rabble that frequent these establishments. We know what you serve. Don't patronize us. But the people who wait in line only to ponder whether to get the hot coffee or iced coffee should be run off the road into a culvert and sdomized with a tire iron.
In the interest of Roungetable Glasnost, most of my posts will end with me urging that we kill someone in the name of the greater good.