Things that grind your gears

[Imicola]

What are those things that just really annoy you? Whether bad design, overused phrases, or unaware people.

Here's a few of mine that I'd like to get off my chest...

Hooks, usually in UK public loos, which don't remotely resemble hooks and are actually just a small stump incapable of holding a bag. Why would you design that, it's shit.

"Good morning, good afternoon, good evening" as an intro from every single participant on an international remote meeting. I'm so over it, why not just say hello?

"Uptick". Seriously, I'm a statistician and I never came across this term in relation to data before the pandemic. Why?

Back to the public loos, but cubicles which are so small you end up pretty much sitting on the sanitary waste bin. Then if you want to actually use said bin you need to be a contortionist. Ouch. Clearly those bins were designed by men.

While back on the subject of public loos...i don't get the thought process for the design of some air fresheners. "Oh, you know what would be great? If we could design something that would freshen not only the toilet with a loo freshener smell, but also cover the people using the loo with said freshener at frequent intervals... let's just spray it into the air above their heads so it lands in their hair add they wash their hand". NO FFS.

That was cathartic... who's next?

People who are stood stationary looking at their phone (eg on a pavement) and you walk up behind them and just as you're about to go past, they decide that is the very moment to start walking again, thereby getting in your way.

People who drive slower than trucks on the motorway. If you can't even drive at 60 get off the motorway and use A roads.

Public transport:
Evil people sitting on the end seat on a bus and they don't acknowledge you when you ask them to move across. They aren't "getting off the next stop" they're just idle bastards.
Same evil commuters, this time they don't move their bags so people have to walk to the next seat or ask then to move the bag, usually greeted either some teeth sucking/tutting/huffing and puffing.
I've stopped being nice on public transport.

Pavements:
People chatting and glancing and seeing you walking along but they don't move to let you pass. These are the evil people that were previously on the bus...

Public spaces:
Take your plastic bottles and trays home with you instead of dumping them in the park you evil, duck killing people.

It's not safe out there...

People who think their making some sort of point by using cash only.

It happened recently at an event. A visitor only uses cash, but the event / venue was card only. I refused to put her purchases on my card in return for cash.

Cash is a nuisance, and I'm not heading to a post office to put it into the bank.

Colleagues phoning me and saying 'just a quick question' .. just ask the question.

people in supermarket aisles in the middle browsing rather than going at the side then looking,

lack of toilet facilities in villages

car drivers on mobile phones

People who have started saying 'For sure' can fuck off down a hole and be buried.

there was even a thread on here a while ago where the supermarket only had self service card only tills and some were leaving the whole trolley in susposed protest at it

Related to the office:

Loud or Disruptive Co-Workers
Micromanagement
Unreliable Technology
Email Overload
Passive Aggressive Behavior

People who say they want to meet yuk then when you give them some options they don't reply

Replies to a thread that start "Erm..,"

Take it from me, it doesn't make you look clever, superior or incisive it makes you look like a pillock.

Any driver that flashes their lights at me as some superior instruction. Fuck right off. My insurance will not pay out if I kill the cyclist coming up your near side.

As we approach winter it will be women, and it's always women, wearing puffy coats in their cars that mean they cannot steer.

Dog walkers (I am a dog walker) that hang a bag of shit from a tree or bush. What kind of prick picks up a shit, ties a bag and dangles it from a tree?

Mine too, dreadful expression along with boils my piss, just hate them

I went LC with a good friend after she wrote me a text starting "Erm..."

People letting their children (when visiting grandparents) run around screaming in a retirement village. Just shut up, this isn't a playground, and you're likely to knock someone over.

If I don't get a pop culture reference my kids are talking about I go and find out about it, as much as if I'm watching a quiz and there is something I haven't heard of. Not because I'm so desperate to be down with the kids but I like to be able to talk to and relate to other people of all kinds as much as possible (particularly DDs) and I'm just endlessly curious about life. I've always done this - before the internet I'd have to find a dictionary or encyclopaedia. Or just sat there wondering when I couldn't find anything!

So I guess what I find harder to understand is people who lack that curiosity about life.

I am the type of dog walker who carries bags of poo around the entire walk and then sometimes forgets to bin it when they pass a bin! I'm guessing people chuck the bags because there is no litter or poo bin. It's not an excuse, but I did observe yesterday that had I not gone back 50 yards to use a litter bin, there would not have been a single bin on the route we were taking. It's a very well known path and there are at least two places where there ought to be bins, and indeed one bin had been removed entirely from where it used to stand.

The UK positively encourages changing lanes on roundabouts. I live in a county obsessed sign roundabouts so the first 3 I encounter as I leave my house:

— 3 exits onto single lane roads, but the newly built roundabout has dual carriageway. If you are exiting at the second (turning right) you have to change lanes to your left to get off.
— Roundabout for getting onto the motorway, again lanes mysteriously appear to your left and you have to move across 2 lanes to get to your exit.

• A roundabout with 2 lanes exiting onto dual carriageway roads (great, straightforward) except for the new exit onto a newly single lane built with no slip lane exit, so instead of going straight ahead in either lane, you’ve now got to change lanes to exit.

For a country that loves a roundabout, traffic planners really miss the basics.

Things in my very recently built office which are simply crap design.

Example- the lockers are three - high, sat in the floor all around the office. I’ve been allocated a lower level locker. So to access it I have to grovel around on the floor 🤣 genius who designed that didn’t think that women might be wearing skirts or disabled. I wonder why?

Another example- office has showers and even a towel service where you can pick up a clean towel and put it in a bin after your shower. Are there any hairdryers or mirrors to do your makeup. Of course not! You can just wander around the office with soaking wet hair like a wet dog all day. I wonder why it was designed that way?! 😂

Some idiot pillock of a man designed these spaces that’s why! Probs paid a fortune. The bright spark is probs patting himself on the back about his « intelligent design » Intelligent for who Dan?

In public toilets with automatic soap dispensers and automatic taps. The soap comes out but the water doesn't. So annoying.

Wheelchair accessible toilets where the toilet roll is set so far back you have to twist to reach it, and the dryer/hand towel dispenser is tucked in between the basin and the corner so nobody in a wheelchair can get to it.

Families treating the weekly food shop as a day out. Why does the whole family (4-5 people) need to shuffle round the supermarket, blocking the route? Also, more & more couples seem to be shopping together & treating it like "date night."

Faux (sorry) outrage at benign things other people do that you do not. Is it so difficult to understand that people like different things or do things differently, doesn’t make it wrong just different to you. How utterly boring if we were all the same.

Also, posters that jump to LTB and say they would if their husband/partner did what OP’s has done. Sometimes it’s a one off misunderstanding or perceived slight. Yeah… I don’t think you would, you might want to but you probably wouldn’t. And I say this as someone who doesn’t want anything to do with another man again for the rest of my natural born life. Obviously doesn’t apply for serious issues.

@Downunderduchess OMG yes the whole LTB thing really annoys me.
It's so unrealistic for most people
We all have different standards in relationships and to just throw LTB around is ridiculous

People who feel the need to tell me they "don't like tattoos" when they find out I'm a tattooist. It's rude, and unnecessary - what do they think I'm going to do? Charge at them with my machine and somehow tattoo them against their will? People have even wandered in to shops I've worked at just to announce "I don't LIKE all this! I don't LIKE tattoos."

People who say everything happens for a reason despite things like the Holocaust having happened & child cancer.

Wandering into a tattooist shop to tell them you don't like tattoos is bonkers, but someone telling you they don't like tattoos when you tell them what you do is surely just making conversation- not at a great level of open and friendly discourse, sure.

But plenty of people tell me they don't like lawyers or make lawyer jokes around me when I've told them what I do. Or they think I'm an ambulance chaser or that lawyers only do criminal law and conveyancing.