AIBU to be annoyed by these people on my local Facebook page?

[FacebookLocals]

Euguughhhh - they drive me nuts. I know I could leave but the group is 50% useful stuff (we have an A-road on our morning commute that is frequently closed due to accidents and the page always knows first, that kind of thing) and 50% utter shite. Does anyone else have these kinds of people or do I just live in a bonkers place?!

1. One woman has set up her own cleaning company with her daughter (good for them - this is something I think is great). What irritates me is that, even though it's the two of them and no one else, they keep posting adverts that say people should use them because "unlike other cleaning companies", they pay their staff a "fair wage"... but they are their staff. I've never had a cleaner but my understanding is that you either go through an agency (where you pay a higher amount and the cleaner themselves get about minimum wage) and you get security that they'll find someone else if your usual cleaner is sick/holiday/maternity/whatever and they have solid insurance and that kind of thing, or you go direct to a self-employed person (you pay slightly less but the cleaner gets it all - after their costs) but there's less security (i.e. if they're sick then they're sick and won't be coming). This cleaner is trying to portray the best of both for herself... Just annoys me to try and claim some kind of moral highground when they don't have one.
2. The people who post completely irrelevant, chain-mail jokes - usually pretty sexist ones about women being unable to drive... They aren't relevant to the group (and they aren't funny) - if you can't control yourself, just share them on your personal Facebook page.
3. The people who see blatant vandalism or theft and go "oh, get a life" or "we were all young once", "I bet you ain't perfect". Like, you know, I'm a fully grown up adult and I've never once set an abandoned building on fire, egged anyone or left upturned trolleys all over a road. On top of that, as a grown fucking adult, I have the brain capacity to realise that setting things on fire and blocking emergency vehicles could do serious harm (even if that's not in the minds of those teens when they did it). On top of that, I know full well that when people my age (back when I was a teen) did anything like this, every decent adult would've obliterated them for being little shits... so, if teens are always going to do stupid things, when did adults stop doing their part of the routine?! Lo and behold, when the vandalising abandoned buildings turned into abandoning their business or when doing stupid thing turns into threatening them, they completely fail to recognise that they allowed that to progress by excusing the poor behaviour when it started.
4. Parents bitching about the local school's "ridiculous" behaviour policy where their child was sent to the isolation room for politely asking if they're allowed to breathe or for raising their hand to point out a stray puppy was on fire. Like, no, your kid can't behave and it's embarrassing that you can't see you're being lied to.
5. The people who refuse to answer questions that are asked. Things like one bloke asking if there are any recommendations for local garages and the first comment is "I don't have a car so I can't help, sorry"... like, why comment?! I once asked for recommendations for childcare - either a nursery or a childminder - and all but one comment was people saying to make sure the childminder has a DBS check. Like, ok, I'm not an idiot, that's not what I asked.
6. Non-stop incorrect legal advice at every turn - "you can't do that, it's a violation of GDPR", "tell them to press charges", "I'll go over there and make a citizens arrest". I just can't take any more of it!
7. People asking questions that are literally on Google - "does anyone know what time Tesco closes?" (not on Christmas or things where Google might not be accurate), "what's the phone number for the GP surgery?", "is it an inset day at the school today?" (cue 19847 different comments about the five potential schools that could be being asked about, none of which have an inset day and all of which have their calendars on their websites).

I just wonder if people were always like this and had different outlets (I don't really remember a time before Facebook) or are people getting weirder? Or is this just my local page and everyone is normal where you are?

I know it's gone midnight, this is slightly lighthearted...

Block or mute the people who post things you don’t like. I just scroll by.

The one that really gets me is Nextdoor. It's an absolute cesspool: most of the people who go on there are spoiling for a fight and illiterate. The racism and xenophobia is eye-watering and the posts immediately trigger long screeds about "sending them back" etc.

Someone posted a couple of weeks ago: "there's a black teenager on a bike outside my house. Should I call the police?" I live in South London so black teenagers aren't a rare sight. I find it astonishing that people manage their day to day lives with this level of paranoia.

By contrast my local Facebook page seems positively civilized.

On my local group this week we had a death threat. A man so pissed off about a decision made by the local council that he said he was going to go down to the council offices and shoot whoever was responsible for making the decision.
Cue a massive pile on, 50% of people horrified and the other 50% agreeing ‘yes, go shoot them all’ sort of thing.
Someone wrote that it’s come to something if you can’t even threaten to shoot people anymore without the woke snowflakes getting all upset.

Bring back the Yellow Pages, lol.

You forgot posts about fireworks - every year it’s the same. It’s like it comes as a complete surprise to them. Thankfully they’ve been banned on our local page.

#1 rule of village facebook groups is that they’re full of ass-hats and bloody annoying, but indispensable for the reasons you list as well!

lol 😂 this is in ours….every few months ‘suspicious van at 4 am’ …… turns out it’s the milkman !

This drives me mad too. The choir group I am on has pages and pages of stuff not remotely connected to singing. It is then difficult finding the stuff that is important.

I have lived in my village for a year. Moved here as only 15 mins from city, lovely pubs and food and a looked after village. I am in a new build estate, so not the most popular housing. but after a year I have realised the true villagers don’t like change and are not welcoming.

local FB has complained about:

1. a restaurant opened by a semi famous chef. It’s amazing and has attracted people from all over, big waiting list and people who then use the 3 local pubs. Locals complain the pubs are too busy now. But the pubs said they were struggling and love the new trade. Restaurant is now moving to a bigger premises out of the village. They got fed up of the complaints of too many cars in the village. Pubs worried about trade
2. eyesore patch of land with rubbish and badly kept fences. Small storage unit with 3 shops and lots of parking being built. think it’s a mechanics. Rumours and objections being encouraged as it may operate 24 hours and increase cars to the area. Despite replacing an eyesore and saying in planning application it would be office hours.
3. massive sports fun day for kids. Parking on fields was an eyesore. Parking in streets caused inconvenience to people. It happened once a year and was advertised in advance. Lots of people had fun.

Yep ours is full of pictures of perfectly healthy cats that are supposedly lost and people posting pictures of peoples cars if they've parked wrong or people who have looked at them funny in the local park!

Oh and posts from someone saying their parcel has been delivered to someone else's house by mistake and all the replies saying go hunt them down they're a thief! Rather than it could be an accident from the delivery driver!

Some of these have made me howl and can relate to a lot of them on our FB page.
We have people asking about bus times, opening times of the local shop, fireworks and speeding drivers .
And there is always one person who thinks they are a medical/legal/planning/education expert using worlds that don’t mean what they think they do

For queries, I sometimes (if in a bad mood) put LMGTFY!

Ours can be (between all of the above posts) quite witty.

One time someone posted rather irate that someone had nicked "their" traffic cone and if anyone saw their cone to return it IMMEDIATELY.
Queue around 503 posts of various traffic cones around the borough and beyond asking if this was the one.
Followed by said lady and friends saying it wasn't funny, a serious matter and accusing others of bullying.

The advent of anonymous posts has definitely brought the tone down though. They're either posts along the lines of "what time does the post office open?" which has no reason to be anonymous. Or people using the opportunity to post something racist or offensive in another way (we had a phase of "Isn't Trump really a lovely teddy bear cuddly generous person who only has other people in his heart when he's making policies?" about the same time MN seemed to have an influx of similar. And in line with MN's fangirls there seemed to be a rather off likelihood of using a Russian spelling..?)
Or the other ones are the Liberal Democrats posting something nasty about the Tories/Labour/any other political party. Occasionally their first edit has to remove the logo from the bottom...

I’m sooooo fed up with the same dozen people on our local group posting comments on every post they can saying things along the lines of “Well that’s about right for <town name>. It’s such a fucking shithole nowadays!” It’s really not and most of us like it here! If you don’t, then please just move away. Yes the town centre does have a lot of vape shops, barbers and phone shops, but I travel a lot and so do most town centres nowadays 🤷🏻‍♀️

So many of these types of posts seem to attract people wanting their nanosecond of local fame by posting "funny" comments (always, always men), being generally rude and complaining about certain things that are beyond everyone's control and the voyeurs who want the details of a traffic accident. A typical example of one of these was a young woman who was asking for recommendations for driving instructors who taught in automatic cars. Cue several unwanted and uncalled for inane comments and "jokes" from men informing her that if she couldn't learn to drive in a "proper" car; ie a manual car, she shouldn't be learning to drive at all. Finally, someone had a chance to give her the information she had asked for in the first place.

Ours is full of people endlessly complaining, even when they’re patently getting what they want.

Yes this trend for using "unalived". I really really don't get it. It's a made up word which will probably be used more and more though I refuse to use it.

Few weeks back our house cat escaped when my dh was putting the bins out. I was in bed asleep at the time. Dh was searching and calling up and down our little street. Eventually found our cat. Come home and went to bed.

next day I saw on FB a video of what the poster had called “a pervert prowler” caught on his camera. There in all his glory is my dh in his dressing gown and slippers looking under cars for our cat.

i had to explain that it wasn’t in fact a perv but my dh.

neighbour apologised and deleted the post. Apparently he didn’t recognise him without his work uniform on.

dh won’t ever live that one down

Your number 4 “stray puppy on fire” really made me laugh 😆

Honestly I blame our local Facebook page for making me give it up altogether. I just can't handle the bitching about how much the high street has gone downhill.

Yes all high streets are on their knees. Our is arguably surviving as best it can, whilst the change to online shopping sees its way through.

They've got me paranoid that the place is actually going downhill, despite evidence of the opposite. Its driving dh mad. 🤣

In my grotty part of East London it's " saw two foreign men, they will steal your dog", our police page has no record of a dog being stolen by anyone in the 12 years I've lived here!!!

Remember at all times that empty vessels make the loudest noises.

I managed to (deliberately) get myself blocked from my local group as I was finding it increasingly difficult not to react to some of the posts...my breaking point was when one of my neighbours about 15 houses along had a rant about the binmen leaving her bins "blocking her driveway" and with her being disabled too and...and...and it went on & on. Luckily for me, another neighbour got in first to remind her that her "driveway" was not her driveway at all, but a virtually unused right of way to some garages around the back of the houses, and that the reasons the bins are left where they are is because the road is narrow and cars are parked half on the road & half on the footpath of both sides of the road, meaning the bin lorry care barely get up the street, let alone the refuse workers being able to move the bins to the back of the truck.

In another post, someone "just wanted to let the owner know" that he'd found her drivers licence in the street, and had taken it round to her house, but as no one was in he'd pushed it through the letterbox. His posted attracted hundreds of likes and love hearts and gushing comments about his honesty and integrity, and how it had restored people's faith in mankind. Meanwhile, I sat there wanting to vomit into my own handbag, thinking the owners of said licence would know it had been returned when they came home to find it on the door mat. I'd have had more respect for the person who'd found it if they'd just returned it and forgotten about it - as any decent person would.

As regards the cleaners in the OP, I could tell the story for her. I've been in the industry a very long time, and have seen again and again very many new start-ups who seem incapable on just focusing on the services they offer, and make out that anyone who dares to charge a penny more than they do is somehow ripping the customer off. Some of the biggest franchised brands in UK domestic cleaning are charging a small fortune for even the most basic cleaning service, because when you've got staff it actually does cost a fortune to employ them correctly and legally...but to the novice new start-up, it's all about them trying to correct what they think is wrong and think that they've somehow come up with the miracle answer despite the fact that some of the brands they are discrediting have been trading internationally for over forty years.

"what time does the post office open?

The best (worst) I saw was "Does anyone know what time the walk-in [NHS urgent care] centre is open till?". The replies were priceless, if not contradictory, with someone even going as far as to say "it used to be eight o'clock, but that was a few years ago, not sure now".

I mean, I happen to know that the doors in the clinic used to be purple, until it was refurbished and they were all painted grey...so what, you may ask, but the usefulness of my snippet of information is, in reality, identical to that of the person I mentioned. As in, f**k all use.

We get a gazzillion posts moaning about selfish cyclists followed by cyclists moaning about selfish motorists. Then it all descends into 'get a life' type responses.

Then there are the thinly veiled racist posts about how it used to be a lovely area, now it's a s-hole and blaming 'Starmer'.

I find it so depressing I have to regularly snooze it.

Loving these!

Our one has:

The woman who knows everyone, who automatically shares everything they post on their own page to the group. Annoying. If I wanted to see her garden multiple times per day, I would follow her on FB.

The brothers who tag each other in things and mock people. Very obvious, not sure why admin allows it when he pulls the plug on others.

A woman always asking if someone is “gifting” something, usually expensive and “must be new”. Last week she asked for an electric mixer and a garden bench. “Must be new”. No one replies but she still
posts.

Joan the Moan, having a grumble about something. Usually perfectly legally parked cars. Or that she hasn’t yet heard a cuckoo and it late.

Phil the Postie asking for help to make sure items get delivered. Top postie.

Someone getting hysterical because there was a snake in the road - it was part of a bike tyre.

TWWWG - The Woman Who Won’t Google - asks everything that Google can tell her. Unsure if she is incompetent, lazy or attention seeking.