Annoying Facts Of Life That I Can Do Nothing to Change, Yet Love to Complain About

I am a big fan of the vlogbrothers, and I was recently watching one of their older videos on YouTube:

Now, normally I am a very positive person. But I felt such a kinship with Hank after watching this video. As my fellow member of humanity, Hank and I beat on together, boats against the current of all the petty frustrations in this life and in our shared experience as human beings. I was inspired with (for me) the somewhat uncommon desire to whine like a small child. However, where the technology of videomaking is concerned, I have all the mad skill of a drunk tiger attempting to needlepoint a representation of the quadratic equation, so I thought I'd best stick with the written word. Jane Wagner said: "I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain." I think she was on to something.

And so, without further ado, here are three of my own, petty, selfish, irrational pet peeves.

1: The Stealth Samaritan 

Imagine this scene: you have a cold. There is nasty, gooey stuff blocking your nasal passageway. You reach for a tissue, and, a few seconds later, there is slightly less nasty, gooey stuff blocking your nasal passageway. You are now faced with a minor problem: where to put the tissue? If it weren't for the Stealth Samaritan, that  well-intentioned person in your life bent on making the world a better place without warning anyone first, this would be an easy problem to solve. Your arm reaches out to the spot that you know the trash can is always kept, you release the tissue, and: it falls on the floor because someone decided to clean the bathroom and move the can not six inches to the left, not far away but right out the normal scoring zone. 

This should not be a big deal, but it drives be absolutely 'round the bend and back again. I feel tempted to either draw a chalk line around the expected circumference of the location of the trash can or to just nail it to the floor.

2: The Red Line of Ego

Spellcheck is really quite a marvelous invention. My only problem with it is the little red and green lines that underline text which the software stubbornly believes are not words and/or are grammatically incorrect. I have no problem with them when I have actually made an error. But there is a point at which they cease to be helpful and start to be more annoying than Ronald McDonald at a military funeral. Take the word 'deoxyribonucleic,' for example. I know that I am spelling it correctly, as it is a word that I had to use quite a lot in Biology class this past year. However, Spellcheck does not know this. Spellcheck does not even think it is a word. And so Spellcheck stubbornly underlines the word in red every time I type 'deoxyribonucleic' until I add the word to my dictionary. 

Do you have any idea how annoying it is to look at something you've just typed and see little red squiggles everywhere? Spellcheck has unjustly accused me of error and will not get off my back about it. If my relationship with computerized writing programs is Les Miserables, Spellcheck is Javert and I am Jean Valjean. Javert's intentions are to rid the world of petty crime, miscreants, befoulers, and mispelled words. In reality, he pursues me, unfortunate Microsoft Word Purchaser 24601, to the ends of the earth, over a crime that really isn't one at all. Now, the only thing I have left to do is write a 1,000+ page book about my suffering that will later be adapted into a musical and several movies. It'll be awesome. I'll let you know once I'm taking pre-orders for signed copies. 

3: The Human Embodiment of the "Buffering" Spinny Circle

As I am a human, one of my attributes is that I have many faults. One of these faults, I freely admit, is an astounding lack of anything resembling patience or the ability to wait. My attention span is too long to be measured in milliseconds, granted, but I have what I refer to as 'selective attention.' If, for example, I'm practicing piano, I can play for two and a half hours straight and not even notice how much time has passed, greatly concerning my family and friends because they think something has happened to me and causing them to prepare to come and fetch me from the place I am practicing. (Yes, that has actually happened). But, if I try to concentrate on something that I don't care about at all, I find myself daydreaming so badly that I come back to earth several minutes later when I learn from someone I'm talking to that I have just said "uh-huh" in response to "where do you want to get lunch?" 

But I digress. Basically, I'm really impatient when I have to wait for something. Something like a person who is walking inexplicably, inexcusably and mind-blowingly slow down a narrow space that they cannot be passed in. This makes me upset because they are occupying the space that I currently wish to be breezing through en route to my destination. These people, to me, embody the human equivalent of that spinning circle that one sees when a video is too busy buffering to continue to play. I was recently stuck on a hike behind three people of this nature who thought that they were being quite speedy. To make matters even more vexing, these three people happened to be 13-year-old males who wanted nothing more in life than to talk loudly about all the ways that they could kill electronic people in videogames, have the electronic people kill each other, and otherwise erect a fascade of the glorification of violence, which they evidently believed to be the epitome of masculinity. It's even sadder that one of them seemed to be under the vague idea that if I overheard all of this, I would be impressed.

And those are my three complaints for today. What irrational thing gets on your nerves? Comment below, so that we can all complain together, like one big, happy, whining online family!