Stuff that makes you disproportionately cross

Stuff that doesn't actually perform its primary function well because it's "designer"
Things that break irreparably for the want of 5% uplift in manufacturing costs.

McDonalds/Costa/Starbucks packaging strewn all over the countryside, miles from the nearest outlet. In fact any litter but McDonalds in particular.
Their customers are all tramps!
Oh, & deflated helium balloons that aren’t in a bin.

People who make judgements on life choices based on the food/drink/bike of other people.

Most attempt to get the best they can with what they have.

Being required to have an opiniin about things I’m stone cold indifferent to, with particular regard to...

...the specific shade of several, very similar, light blue paints that you are trying to decide between. Light blue on the kitchen wall is fine, any of them, honestly.

Oh, and putting crockery etc at the FRONT of the upper rack in the dishwasher, in such a way that I have to move them in order to get other things onto the space now left at the back. Grrrr

Dog poo bags and litter make me angry, but that’s perfectly reasonable so those don’t belong on this thread.

See also bad driving, parked cars idling, etc. Anger and irritation are a perfectly reasonable response.

But what about incorrect use of apostrophes, or constantly sniffing rather than blowing your nose?

I hope this is cathartic, there a few things on this thread that people really shouldn't be getting riled up by! Think of your blood pressure! 😁

Anyway, mine's a recycling one too. Unflattened boxes in the cardboard recycling. Yes it's bloody full 2 days after it was last collected because the boxes from all the Amazon and Hut Group shite you buy is stacked up in the bin like the leaning tower of Pisa!

I don't think it's disproportionate to get annoyed by persistently inconsiderate behaviour.

My OHs Project Management skills.

This qualifies as they are so small relative to the ammount of anger they induce in me.

Last year she decided she didn't like the understairs cupboard (to be fair it was quite nasty with T&G cladding).

But rather than actually have any sort of plan she just half demolished it leaving bits of wood hanging from the staircase/joists that were too securely attached for her, and random nails sticking out the walls.

It then became my fault that I'm neither a carpenter, plasterer or electrician (because the thermostat, HW cylinder and boiler controlls needed moving too as a result), which then meant ripping up the floorboards upstairs. And thus this job has absorbed almost every free weekend I would have had this year in-between working two jobs as I do it, then have to re-do because I haven't a clue and nothing in the bloody house is square/straight so the stud wall I had to build to hide all the wiring and utilities that were in the cupboard is more shims than studs.

And next doors Dashound.

No it's not ****ING cute that it thinks it's a big dog and barks at everything. It barks at me going out my front door, it barks at me when I'm in the garage, it barks at me in the garden, it barks at me in the conservatory, it barks at me if I'm cooking with the window open.

It's currently involved in a standoff between me having an aneurysm and it suffering an unfortunate accident.

People taking to me from another room.

Being asked to do something that I was just about to do.

Paper straws.

 it thinks it’s a big dog and barks at everything

It's a dachshund, they do that. It can be trained out of them, but it takes ages, and needs constant repetition training, so folks give up.

Not switching the hairdryer off at the socket after use.

Why would that annoy you? There is absolutely no reason to switch them off at the socket after use – they aren't even a phantom user of electricity.

Pavement parking.

There are two ways to do it.

1. Park almost fully on the pavement, almost always blocking the pavement for anyone who might have a pram, wheelchair, mobility issues etc. It's an utter dick move.

2. Park a bit on the pavement. Well done you are now blocking both the traffic lane and some of the pavement. You've helped no one, so just park on the road. Half a car in a traffic lane blocks the lane just as well as a full car in the lane. The utter stupidity of this practice makes my brain hurt thinking about it.

Old men whistling in supermarkets. Absolutely enrages me, and I can’t explain it!

Niche! Very, very niche!

Old men whistling in supermarkets. Absolutely enrages me, and I can’t explain it!

Is 48 old?? It may have been me. I apologise. Especially if it was the most common tune to appear in my daily mental playlist - Popcorn...again, i apologise 😉

People who ring me. 🖕

There is absolutely no reason to switch them off at the socket after use – they aren’t even a phantom user of electricity.

Its a fire risk. Admittedly a small one, but the switch won't be a well engineered thing so there is a risk of it not being properly switched off or failing. A hairdryer sat on the side running could potentially start a fire. Same goes for hot air guns in workshops. Usually they have a better quality switch but its still a H&S issue

Its a fire risk. Admittedly a small one, but the switch won’t be a well engineered thing so there is a risk of it not being properly switched off or failing.

There's cautious and there's cautious. In all my like I have never known a hairdrier to spontaneously switch itself on start a fire. I accept they could start a fire *if left on and unattended* but not by switching themselves back on.

Pretty much everything I can relate to - especially "hidey tidy" that's my wife. BMP

but this

jimw
Not switching the hairdryer off at the socket after use. I have tried all sorts of strategies to encourage this without success.

What?

Someone taking a hex key from the hex key set, using it and NOT PUTTING IT BACK.

You could boil cold water with the fury that induces in me.

People stopping in doorways in busy places. People that can't walk in a straight line. People who walk slowly. Groups of people having a chat in the middle of the high street pavement so no one can get past. Parking in bus lanes then moaning about traffic and/or that buses are never on time. Double yellow lines apparently meaning park on the pavement. The people who added a load of stuff to my recycling bins last night but put it all in the wrong ones so I had to sort it all again. I could go on and on. So many people failing rule one.

the regular flashpoints in our house are usually variations on the following

- tidying things away to a different place each time with no consistency or rhyme or reason and then forgetting where they were. if only we just put things in the same place each time!
- other people watching you tube videos / tik tok / whatever random crap has been whatsapped to them whilst we're trying to watch a film / TV (see also taking / making phone calls in same situation)
- inability to sit down an watch a film al the way though without continuous pausing it - fair enough pause it while you nip to the toilet, but do you really need to tidy the kitchen or do a quick hoover of the landing whilst your up or could it wait until after the film?

due to point one, i leave things on the kitchen side to remind me to take back to the workshop after being used before they disappear in to the random tidying black hole - this apparently annoys the other members of the house

People that don't say thank you or even attempt a token acknowledgement when you hold a door open for them. They usually fall in one of two camps; 1 – younger women with painted faces and artificially inflated lips; 2 – anyone over 60.

There’s cautious and there’s cautious. In all my like I have never known a hairdrier to spontaneously switch itself on start a fire.

It has happened. Believed to be the cause of a recent fire in a barbers in Southwark. 15,000 fires a year started by domestic appliances. Admittedly mostly ovens, and most hairdryer fires are caused by putting a hot hairdryer away in a drawer. Leaving one plugged in is a small risk but an easy one to avoid.

Chinese Lanterns - littering, but with fire.
Mass balloon releases - it's just littering, but for some reason it's acceptable if it's for a good cause.
Littering in general really.
People driving about with their fog lights on in summer - I can see you've got your sidelights on too, so I know they're not running lights you f***wit.
People who get a dog but can't be arsed to train it. Flip side being I actually went out of my way on a ride to help a lady with a rescue dog that would always bark at bikes, obviously normally it's a case of bark and it goes away, dog thinks it's done good, rinse & repeat. So I stopped, chatted and gave the dog a treat, dog now associates bikes with friendly people and doesn't bark. She's happy, dog's happy, bikers are happy. Yay.

It’s a dachshund, they do that. It can be trained out of them, but it takes ages, and needs constant repetition training, so folks give up.

This one it particular egregious. I came home from 3 months working in a dog shelter with ~100 dogs and thought "this is annoying".

Coupled with the stereotypical Mediterranean matriarch of the family living with them apparently only having one volume level, a typical exchange goes something like this:

YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

Ohh FFS will someone shut that dog up (I, along with every other neighbor have sworn over the fence at them about the little shit)

UNINTELIGABLEPORTUGESE/SPANISH/ITALIANSHOUTINGFROMTHEHOUSE

UNINTELIGABLEPORTUGESE/SPANISH/ITALIANSHOUTINGBACKFROMSOMEOTHERROOM

YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

I've not seen them walk the effing thing in 2 years either.

I cut them some slack to let it settle in over lockdown but I'm not going through another summer of not being able to sit in the garden.

The lack of latch-on capability on british petrol pumps. Nowhere else in the world forbids this. Backpressure sensors have been on pumps since forever and work really well. I don't see people in other countries spontaneously combusting at the pump while the tank self-fills or evidence of mass spilling events as the tank overflows continuously over the forecourt. Up there with our stupid fused "safety" plugs <kettle on fire in background while 30A main fuse and 13A plug fuse do sweet FA>.

Poor QC on anything, but particularly expensive stuff:
Gibson guitars usually look like they've been made by a blind alcoholoic.
They've not, they've been made by untrained staff on minimum wage in a poorly lit factory WITH NO QC.

Greggs running out of Steak Bakes within an hour of opening.

Husky/Malmute owners who walk around in packs, wearing Hi-Vis jackets and not making eye contact with anyone.

It has happened. Believed to be the cause of a recent fire in a barbers in Southwark. 15,000 fires a year started by domestic appliances. Admittedly mostly ovens, and most hairdryer fires are caused by putting a hot hairdryer away in a drawer. Leaving one plugged in is a small risk but an easy one to avoid.

I put an alexa smart plug on Mrs OTS' hair straighteners because she was forever worried that she'd forgotten to switch them off.

Screwfix & toolstation pack size lottery

They know fine ****ing well they serve the trade and DIY markets but only sell some basic consumables in giant packs that would last all but a major contractor months and months. Whilst others come in a sensible range of pack sizes.

I give you 100m rolls of earth sleeve and 50 packs of enormous coach bolts.

Believed to be the cause of a recent fire in a barbers in Southwark.

One fire engine from Dowgate Fire Station also attended along with fire investigators, who believe the fire was caused by a hairdryer which had been left on.

It was user-error, not a switch spontaneously failing.

It was user-error, not a switch spontaneously failing.

Yes, our mad switched sockets also annoy me. Again we're the only ones with these (India are slowly binning them for schuckos or multi-compatible sockets). A throwback to post-war Britain when houses were fused with 4 circuits as we were utterly broke and all our consumer goods were crap. Thinking about it, in post-brexit britain they're probably needed more than ever. Can I make my house an earth free zone?

There’s cautious and there’s cautious. In all my like I have never known a hairdrier to spontaneously switch itself on start a fire. I accept they could start a fire *if left on and unattended* but not by switching themselves back on.

The H&S flipside is, having a hairdryer is an acceptable risk in return for having dry hair, but where's the risk Vs reward in leaving it plugged in and switched on?

Related example, most workplaces mandate your work PC switched off overnight. But the reason for turning it off isn't to save the IT department the few watts it consumes on standby, it's the small risk of the power supply going pop multiplied by the cost to the business of the office burning down. Very low probabilities with very high consequences.

@tomd
I give you 100m rolls of earth sleeve and 50 packs of enormous coach bolts.

Lifetimes supply of M6 bolts for brakes and fork lowers though!

Weirdly M4 bolts (brake rotors) came in a bag if 10 last time which was really annoying.

The earth sleeve makes great ties for the garden, although it's not UV proof so after a couple of years once whatever it is has established they're probably just adding to the microplastics in the soil.

Single panniers!

EEK...that was me this am..
THough I agree... I'd rather have a shoe in each pannier..but i was in a rush... meh!

DrP

I can clearly remember my mum having a hairdryer with separate heater and fan switches when I was young. Very young, because it was in my first house and we moved out of it when I was about 5. Reason I remember is I walked into a bedroom and found it on the bed with the element glowing red hot! That was a bloody stupid design.

Er, single panniers. Sorry, guilty! It's plenty big enough on it's own for my commuting/shopping needs and I don't do cycle touring.

The H&S flipside is, having a hairdryer is an acceptable risk in return for having dry hair, but where’s the risk Vs reward in leaving it plugged in and switched on?

Fair enough, I totally understand that *ANY* item left plugged in with the switch on at the mains could present a risk, but the poster singled out hairdriers like they pose some unreasonable risk. If an individual has such a level of risk aversion then surely they should be switching everything off at the mains when not in use?

Nodding sagely at most of these, but the plug socket thing is just plain weird. Regardless of the practical risk of it spontaneously combusting being somewhere between zero and no really it's zero, does no-one unplug their shit and put it away after use?

To be honest, I don't really understand why we have switches on sockets anyway. My partner is a serial switcher-offer, including (if not especially) empty sockets. It doesn't irritate me particularly, but I do file it squarely into the What's The Bloody Point bucket.

Lending my shovel to a relative to clear the garden at the new property. Receiving it back covered in concrete!

Thirty years and numerous concreting jobs carried out with it and it was still shiny and clean. One minor patio build later and it all cacked up!

A second patio could well be being built as a result of this.

Loud shouty football fans.
Dogs chasing me on my bike. I'll ride off as fast as I can till it stops chasing me.
Anyone calling me "bruv"

Someone taking a hex key from the hex key set, using it and NOT PUTTING IT BACK.

You could boil cold water with the fury that induces in me.

I've got a friend like that, really nice guy but I won't lend him anything since the hard drive enclosure incident - It was one of those universal drive enclosures that will take any drive..came back with 3 of the 4 screws missing from the case cover, my protest was met with a blank stare and a comment of "its not broken, it still works fine". lol

He asked to borrow my socket set and I straight up said, you can't borrow it, but I'll bring it over and you can use it, as I know damn well there will be some sockets missing if I let it out of my sight!

Infact I've just recently borrowed a power drill from him, and guess what? I had to buy a chuck key for it, despite it having a built in chuck key holder, hahah!

unflattened boxes in the cardboard recycling.

I'll see that and raise you 2L pop bottles with the caps nipped up. Back when my girlfriend's daughter lived with us, that was one of her fella's (many, many) irritating party tricks. The dopy sod could fill a fortnightly collected recycling bin in a weekend. I don't get it. It's not even laziness, once you empty the bottle it's then extra effort to screw the cap back down.

The bit at the bottom of Excel that says 'Calculating (8 Threads): 1%'.

While I may have the latest laptop with whatever the latest Intel Superchip is and eleventy billion gigs of RAM, can it add up quickly? No it bloody well can't.

Oh, and,

A number of posts here (such as littering) are perfectly reasonable cross-making situations. I'm looking for things that you know, deep down, that you're internally overreacting to.

Like, others have mentioned "hidey tidy." This is my other half and it drives me ****ing incendiary, but I know it's just me being anally retentive and not something worth having an argument over. A few weeks back I discovered what was left from a pack of 50 pens bought for a mini quiz, stuffed in with the teaspoons in the cutlery drawer. Just... just... we've all seen the film Scanners, right?

What does annoy me, and I think in this case it is justified, is half the time she'll proceed to deny all knowledge. More than once I've said something like "which one of us is most likely to have put this here, the one who stuffs insurance documents in a drawer with the tablecloth, or the one who alphabetises the spice rack?" I am, demonstrably, a monster.

really nice guy but I won’t lend him anything since the hard drive enclosure incident

I've found over the years that people who don't have tools generally have no respect for them. I've long since stopped lending mine out, even to people I'd think would actually have an ounce of mechanical sympathy.

The last time I loaned out tools it was to a couple of guys who did odd jobs for the company. They asked to borrow a screwdriver. Practical guys, I thought, so I lent then my nice bit set. They used it as a drift, the handle came back battered worse than a porn star's helmet.

Why? Why would you do that? Why would you do that to your own stuff, let alone someone else's? I have a cold chisel for fox' sake, you could've borrowed that.

I’ll see that and raise you 2L pop bottles with the caps nipped up.

Current advice is to put the caps back on. It makes automated sorting easier. Loose tops are too small to be "recognised" as plastic waste.

My other half, who in most respects is a very sensible person insists on making gash bits of one-side printed pages into note pads...So far so good, excellent recycling. However she then affixes them to the fridge door with a magnetic clip. When the fridge door hits the walls, they fall to floor and scatter everywhere.When the clip is overfilled with notepaper, it also falls to the floor under the weight of paper...scattering bits of paper everywhere.

Every time the conversation goes something along the lines of..."mind the door against the wall...Oh, too late" or "Don't put too much paper in the clip, it will fall....oh"

somehow it's my job to pick up the bits of paper...

👆 Buy her a stapler, so then you only have to pick up the pad, and not individual sheets.

OH going into the garage (my safe space), rummaging around to find something and leaving all of the moved items on the floor and not replacing all of the original items in their original location.

Current advice is to put the caps back on.

The correct procedure is to squish the bottle between your knees, and put the cap back on, forming a vaccume and therfore a nice flatish bottle that takes up far less space in the recycle bin.

Anything else is pure insanity.

Current advice is to put the caps back on. It makes automated sorting easier. Loose tops are too small to be “recognised” as plastic waste.

I put the caps back on, but I crush all the air out first. Putting the lids on prevents them from expanding again.

somehow it’s my job to pick up the bits of paper…

Schoolboy error.

In any case, why's the door hitting the walls? Fit a doorstop.

i suck the air out.
makes me feel a bit light headedy... free drugz innit...

DrP