• Waking up half an hour before you have to get up, needing to pee too badly to sleep comfortably. But if you get up to pee, you won’t be able to go back to sleep for the remaining half hour.
• Someone (maybe a spouse, maybe not) didn’t listen carefully to the problem you described, and then got annoyed because you weren’t interested in their proposed solutions to the unrelated problem they think you described.
• Websites that were apparently set up by a company that thought, “Hey, we should have a Web Site!”—and then chose a setter-upper who was completely unfamiliar with websites. So for example, a button that says “Sign up for summer camp now!” is not a link. And when you do find the summer camp description, under “Course Descriptions,” it’s the 2012 schedule. And when you email the “email for more information” person to find out when the 2013 summer camp info will be up, they forward it to someone else because they don’t handle the email, and the person they forward it to tells you it all looks right to them: all you have to do is click “Schedule 1” on the pull-down menu and then the dates of the summer camp will show up! (It turns out that to get to “Schedule 1” you have to completely fill out the registration form for yourself and your child and also check boxes saying you agree to all the policies of the company including payment schedules.)
• EBay seller keeps listing the same item over and over, so it keeps appearing in your search results over and over. It doesn’t hurt anything, so there’s no reason to be annoyed. BUT WHY DO THEY KEEP LISTING IT? NO ONE WANTS TO BUY IT.
• The way I type “eBaby” almost every single time.
• A big company won’t make clothes for people who aren’t thin. Same as almost all the other companies.
• An email from an online store, telling me that maybe I’d like to look again at some clothes I looked at yesterday, and showing pictures of everything I looked at. That’s annoying AND creepy.
Colleagues who shrug when pointed to a small and correctable mistake and say, “No one will notice anyway” and are probably RIGHT but still, there is a MISTAKE that can be CORRECTED.
A medium-ish scratch in a brand new piece of furniture, but on the piece of the furniture that will never NOT be against the wall.
Scraping together exactly 85 cents from the depths of your purse in order to get peanut M&Ms from the vending machine, and then pressing the “4” too hard, so that the machine thinks you pressed “44” instead of “48” and getting an Almond Joy, which you will not eat, EVER, because ew, coconut.
(Your first bullet happens to me daily. DAILY.)
(I am annoyed on your behalf by bullets 2 and 3. GAH.)
Working quite hard at Tidying Up and Getting Children Ready for Bed (requires little, but necessary supervision) while Lovely Husband sits on the couch, checking emails on his phone. Then he gripes when asked to pitch in while you go to the laundry room to rotate the clothing.
Parents who bring along a sibling to a birthday party without prior notification. (Happened to me today – luckily, I had extra spots at the party place AND an extra goodie bag, as someone else didn’t bring a brother along when he’d initially been included in the invitation.)
Small children who insist that certain tasks can only be done by Mama. (Serving food, pouring milk and wiping of behinds…seriously kid, get over it)
Being woken up at 5:45 by a kid who only needed to tell you that they needed to use the bathroom. I might as well have gotten up then, and done the damn laundry in peace and quiet. Could have had my coffee and read a magazine FROM COVER TO COVER.
People who call to inquire about your children, refuse to accept your polite and vague “they’re great” response, and insist on knowing how your baby is sleeping/eating. Then, when you tell them they proceed to give you tons of unsolicited advice about how to deal with these parenting “problems” I’m “complaining” to them about.
(Seriously, if you’ve been dying to tell me that you think my baby sleeps too much during the day and needs a pacifier then just come out with it.)
A customer at work, who, after I promised to go the extra mile for him and call him regarding a change on his bill on a certain date, gave me hell when I called him the day after I had stated I would call him. Seriously. I am doing you a favor, dude. Dial it down a notch.
I needed to contact a repair person recently, and my husband found the website of one who looked good. The site said to call the phone number for same day service if it was before 10AM. Since it wasn’t, I filled out the form to have them call me to set up an appointment. The form asked for my name and EMAIL (not my phone number) and then I never got a message from them. Whose bright idea was THAT??
The police car that didn’t have its lights or sirens on, but failed to yield to me and my toddler in the crosswalk, just so it could sit longer at the subsequent red light. The teenagers who thought the little kids area of the playground was the perfect place to roll a joint and the swings area was the perfect place to smoke it :/
The colleague at work who REFUSES to respond to my emails no matter what…
The annoying solicitation phone calls on my land line – you’ve called 50 times, I haven’t answered. Get a clue.
And, of course, numbers 1, 2, & 3 of your list as well.
I am always and constantly annoyed by the clothes thing. Fat people want affordable cute stuff too!
also i just read the book “bright sided” which swistle I think you would like and then i blogged about it and now i am annoyed in advance at the comments people are going to leave on my fb page. OMG HOW DARE YOU QUESTION POSITIVE THINKING YOU HEATHEN.
A healthy cat that has mysteriously begun peeing on the dog bed, but with no pattern or apparent provocation, thus necessitating constant laundering of the bed, which hardly fits in the tiny stackable washer and dryer.
A cat (the SAME cat, incidentally) that randomly poops outside her pristine litter box. Again, without a pattern or obvious trigger, making it extremely difficult to figure out what the problem is.
A dog, who on the day that the cat actually does NOT do either of the above, has a massive accident in her crate thereby requiring all of the bedding to be laundered.
Pets in general. Or at least MY pets, which seem to be staging an uprising against me personally, because all of these incidents manage to occur on days when my husband is not here to help me with the fallout. It’s a conspiracy.
I thought of ANOTHER one: the life insurance websites that specifically ask you a) how you want to be contacted (email, please) and b) WHEN you want to be contacted (evening/after the work day, please) and have options for BOTH of the preferences you have… And yet the Actual Life Insurance Sales Person blatantly ignores both preferences and CALLS in the MORNING. So many levels of annoyed about that one. SO MANY.
When your kid breaks the toilet seat (cracked right through!) by standing on the ring to reach the washcloths, even though there is a perfectly good step stool RIGHT THERE.
When this happens moments before out of town visitors arrive.
And of course they need to pee. So they see that you duct taped it so it doesn’t pinch.
Congrats. Your stuffy, wealthy, extended family guests are privy (lol) to your duct taped toilet. Sweet.
I’ll be laughing about this one all day!
I hate the ‘you looked at an item on a website and now your ads will show you that item for the next month’ thing. Haaaaaaate.
Haaaate! For some reason it annoys me even more when they continue to show after you’ve already bought it.
Having a new coworker that people tell you is very sensitive about being babied so you give her her space and then she doesn’t do stuff and doesn’t answer your e-mails which hinders your work so you have to step in and then everyone gets mad at you for a) not doing your work and b) being insensitive…
I like it when a company doesn’t make clothes in my size if the company has long had a series of douchebaggy policies that mean I wouldn’t buy its clothes anyway. Good, obnoxious company. So we understand each other.
Hate advertisers on social networking sites that have policies that allow supposed jokes about violence against women but don’t allow images of breastfeeding or breast reconstruction. On the other hand, I saved some money by cancelling my subscription to a certain provider of audiobooks. So win, I guess?
There is this one thing I have to do every week at work. It takes all of two minutes, but I dread it because it requires me typing the word “activity.” Without that word it would probably only take one minute. Activitity. NO. DELETE. Acitivity. NO. DELETE. Acticity. NO. DELETE. A – C – T – I – V – I – T – Y. YES. Move on. No, wait. That doesn’t look right, either. No. That’s right. Dang. Copy. Open internet. Merriam Webster. Paste. Okay. MOVE ON.
Yup, that’s my four-year college degree at work, folks.
The soccer and futsol teams oldest is involved in have two of the worst websites I’ve ever encountered. They appear to have been designed by people whose main goal was to make it as difficult as possible to find out anything about scheduling, teams, payment, or practice schedules. Every time I have to get on one site or another, I’m filled with frustration and irritation. Oldest is likely to be involved with these two teams for a long time and the thought of dealing with their bites for years fills me with anger.
Spending an hour shopping in an awesome sale at an online store and then finding out they don’t ship to your country. Or that the sale doesn’t apply to purchases from your country. (i’m looking at you, bananan republic.)
Spending all afternoon cooking a nice meal and having hubs buy the four year old a ‘snack’ of a burger and full sized milkshake one hour before dinner. (and no, I am not a terrible cook.)
Thirteen month old gives you the actual opportunity to sleep three consecutive hours and the fat tabby won’t stop tapping you on the forehead to tell you his kibble bowl is empty. (Pssst. Mama. Hey Mama. Mama. I’m hungry. Ma-ma. Wake-up.) And walking to fill the bowl is enough to wake the toddler.
YES. Or they do ship to your country – for fifty bucks, plus the same again in duty. It’s Canada, dudes, not Outer Mongolia. And I would like to smack your husband upside the head on your behalf.