Category Archives: What Annoys Jeff this Week?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The long slog to summer. Now that we’ve tipped the hat to the father of our country, we start the long, hard march to Memorial Day. For those of you not keeping track, that’s 13 straight weeks without a federally approved long holiday weekend in the mix. It feels like a very, very long time between breaks. Of course I’ll probably throw a few days of my own leave at this problem to keep from having a complete break from reality. That’ll stave off the worst effects, but it clearly no substitute for legitimate long weekends. Others will disagree, but for me, this slog from mid-February to late May is the worst part of the year.

2. CBO Reports. The Congressional Budget Office is the non-partisan doer of research on behalf of the feckless officials we elect to Congress. Their reports are spun by both sides equally, but on balance the reports themselves are as close to fair and balanced as we’re likely to see from any large bureaucratic organization. I forced a laugh when I saw their latest report on the impact of the proposed minimum wage hike. It’s the classic Washington good news, bad news story. The good news is raising minimum wage could lift as many as a million people above the poverty line. The bad news is it could also simultaneously throw as many as half a million people out of work. A report like that gives both sides plenty of ammunition and seems to increase the likelihood that we’ll stay true to form and opt to do nothing at all. Based on the CBO’s report, it seems that a radical increase in the minimum wage is a devil’s bargain at best… great if you keep your job and get your raise, but a spectacularly craptastic deal if you’re one of the 500,000 extraneous employees who are thanked for playing and invited to go on back to the house.

3. Dreaming while you sleep. It’s very rare for me to remember dreams I have once I wake up. Sometimes they’ll stick as a vague recollection, but usually they’re gone by the time my eyes are fully open. Except the one I had last night that featured a former boss of mine. Somehow he showed up in my current office with glowing red eyes, tore up a couple of cubicles and then hurled a potted plant at my head. The odd thing might not be that I remembered this little episode once I woke up, but that it didn’t actually feel very surprising. Make of that what you will.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. SnowSleetRain. The dreaded wintery mix. Snow is easy enough. Shovel it aside and go n about your business. Sleet isn’t as forgiving and a hell of a lot harder to get rid of. Rain just makes the whole thing a soggy mess that weighs 17 tones per scoop. Worst of all, the rain melts off the good stuff that justifies extended time off from work. So, yeah, in the little scenario that has played out today, rain has basically been the unwelcome spoiler, conspiring to ruin what could have otherwise been an extra-long long weekend.

2. Unexpected visitors. If you show up uninvited and unexpected banging on my door, don’t look horrified when you’re met by a large barking dog on my side of the storm door. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky that a barking dog is all you were met by. For purposes of argument, let’s just say when I answered an unexpected knock on the door in Memphis, I was always in the company of something that carried a lot more stopping power than a startled chocolate lab.

3. Lacking “it”. Define “it” any way you want: motivation, interest, focus, enthusiasm. Whatever “it” is, I have none. “It” is a tricky thing, you see. It isn’t linear and it can’t be gained nearly as rapidly as it’s lost. The goodwill and drive, built up over months and years can be lost in days and weeks. Compounded out over a long enough amount of time, and “it” is damned near impossible to ever get back… Which makes it any awfully good thing that I don’t keep all those eggs in once basket. It would be a real crying shame to be one of those people who found their motivation, there reason for being from just one thing. Suckers.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. CVS. They’re getting great acclaim for making the decision to stop selling cigarettes. It’s their business, I say God bless if that’s what they want to do. I’m left wondering if they’re also planning to stop selling Coke, Doritos, Snickers bars, and all the other items on their shelves that have been identified as cancer causing, bad for you, or just socially “inappropriate.” Let’s be honest with ourselves at least. CVS is a drug store. Their whole raison d’être is selling medications, many of which themselves can cause untold amounts of harm even when taken as directed. Call me cynical, but I don’t see them taking a principled stand in the name of public health so much as I see them making a public relations and marketing move.

2. Bugs. No, not the kind of creepy crawlies that sneak into the house and needs dispatched with the closest available newspaper, magazine, or shoe. I’m more agitated by the kind that live in apps and cause mysterious and damned near impossible to track down battery drain on my phone. Thanks to these gremlins, I get to spend a few hours backing up everything I have on my phone, tricking the thing into believing it’s once again fresh out of the box, and then reinstalling each app one by one so I don’t accidentally reintroduce whatever power hungry gremlin resided in the old version. For a device that “just works,” I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time poking around under the hood to keep things humming along without the need to recharge it every four hours.

3. Passwords. It took me five attempts to log into my own damned website today. That’s mostly because two days ago the site forced me to create a new one. It couldn’t be any old password, of course, but one that was at least eight characters included upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, special characters, hieroglyphics, quadratic equations, and the square root of pi rounded to the nearest non-repeating decimal. I get it. Internet security is important. It’s so important that apparently the best way we can manage not to lose all our secrets to the Chinese, or the Russians, or the NSA is creating the illusion of a random string of characters. If security is as important as the internet thinks it is, can someone please explain to me why we’re not using retina scanners, fingerprint readers, blood samples, or something, anything that would be more convenient than needing to remember a new 742 character password every third day?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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The hardest aspect of writing What Annoys Jeff this Week isn’t finding the three things that have agitated the shit out of me during the last seven days, it’s the culling through the multitude of life’s little indignities to arrive at the three that best sum up the week that was. As ever, it’s a precarious balancing act between my liberty to speak and my willingness to deal with the consequences of those words once they’ve left my brain and shown up on the internet. In that spirit, I proudly present you with the 110th installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week.

1. Failure to communicate. Nine times in ten I don’t mind when something I’ve bought and paid for is backordered. As long as I know it in advance or it’s communicated to me as quickly as possible after the order. What you shouldn’t do is wait for two weeks, fill the balance of the order, and only then let me know that the one widget I needed to make it all work is backordered indefinitely. Some people would probably shrug it off, but for me it’s a sure guarantee that I’ll repackage the whole thing, return it at your expense, and never conduct business with you again. When you fail to communicate with the customer, at least when that customer is me, everyone loses.

2. Being not quite sick. There’s a murky line somewhere between feeling well and being sick. I’ve found astride that line for the last two days. With an obnoxious cough, a turbulent stomach, and a general feeling of malaise, I’ve mostly crashed through the mid-week period feeling vaguely out of sorts and enjoying the attention span the Almighty gave to the average walnut. It’s not the recipe for doing great and wonderful things. In fact it’s most likely the recipe to make sure foolishness and asshattery lurk around every corner.

3. Anything to do with the Winter Olympics or the Super Bowl. So there rest of the world doesn’t respond with a visceral sigh when someone mentions either the Olympic Games or the Superbowl. I’m sure there are even those reading this now who are beside themselves with anticipation of the great and exciting things to come. As for me, my disinterest has been driven to a state of outright hostility by the sheer shove-it-down-your-throatedness of media coverage of both of these events. I’ll leave the rest of the world to their excitement. As for me, I’m not a bit interested in any of it… until the summer games… or the world women’s volleyball championship. Whichever comes first.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Being polite. I realize the social convention that tells us it’s bad to walk around punching people in the face exists to protect all of us from each other. God knows there are probably of plenty people out there who would like nothing more than the opportunity to slug me with no repercussions, but still, there’s something infuriating about being in a position day-in-and-day-out of being annoyed to your wits end and not being able to say or do anything about it because it would be considered rude. The people who don’t get typical social cues shouldn’t be covered by normal social conventions. When I’ve turned my back to you and you keep talking, I should be allowed to punch you in the face. Invade my personal bubble? Punch in the face. Have no clue that others aren’t interested in a monolog about your top five worst medical problems? Punch in the face. Twice. You get the point. When someone lives outside society’s norms, maybe they shouldn’t be protected by those norms. If your feelings get hurt and your nose gets bloodied in the process, well, maybe that’s just a lesson learned… and yet for some reason when you tell someone they’re being an obnoxious douchecanoe, you’re suddenly the asshat. There is no justice.

2. Celebrities. You know the funny thing about celebrities behaving badly? Their asshattery is only covered by the news outlets because we all tune in. Justin Bieber getting a DUI? News. Brittany Spears flashing her hoohaw. News. Kim and Kanye doing anything? News. Except the thing is, it’s not news. People get DUI’s, show their lady parts, and are generally stupid every day of the year without it being the lead story on every website and newspaper in the country. Celebrities get the attention they do not because they behave badly, but simply because we allow it to be so. It’s the classic example of ignore it and they will go away. Or at least they’ll continue to get into trouble, but do it more or less in anonymity and without it becoming a spectacle. It’s a crying shame that we all can’t just agree to ignore these tools until they stop getting the ink they so desperately want.

3. Policy. As a rule, policy is something I’ve always considered a guideline. It’s the user’s manual version of how to do things – 98.9% of the time, policy coverers just about everything you’ll deal with on a regular basis. Conveniently, though, policy very rarely has the force of something more codified, say like a regulation or a law. That means there’s almost always a way to get an exception to policy (or in more extreme circumstances just ignore the policy because it doesn’t pass the common sense test within the context of new or extenuating circumstances). No one is doing themselves a service when the blindly follow something just because “that’s how it’s done” or “that’s the policy.” You see, the problem with blind adherence to anything is that it so often comes with unintended consequences… and those so very rarely end well for anyone.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. US Postal Service. I know they’re everyone’s favorite whipping boy. I’ve taken them to task a time or two myself, but I like to think it’s not a knee jerk reaction. When a bunch of people are talking about having a craptastic delivery experience, there’s probably at least some truth to the notion. Really, it could all be avoided if the package I ordered last Monday with an estimated delivery date of last Saturday had any sign of ever leaving its point of origin in Oklahoma. Sure, I know first class mail isn’t an overnight service, but it doesn’t seem excessive to expect the post office to, at a minimum, avoid losing track of a package that has a tracking number printed on it. At the very least, they might want to actually respond to a customer request for information from time to time. As a historic institution, I want to like the USPS, but there’s generally a reason I’m willing to pay a few dollars more to ship items through a more reliable provider.

2. McDonald’s. I’ve noticed two things about the local McDonald’s here in scenic Elkton. 1) They’ve never gotten my drive thru order 100% correct; and 2) When I go inside to complain and get the order corrected, the place looks like a damned sty. I’m not a regular, but sometimes you just want a Big Mac and super-salty fries. All I’m saying is that having had the experience of spending more years working at a McDonald’s franchise than I want to admit, the kind of service and level of cleanliness I see here definitely wouldn’t have passed muster back in the day. Im not saying I liked cleaning stainless or sweeping the lobby and more than these guys do, but I do think the standards 19-odd years ago were definitely better. Then again, that seems to be endemic, so maybe it’s just society in general that’s pissing me off and McDonald’s is just a symptom.

3. Harvey Weinstein. So Harvey has decided that he is going to make a movie taking on the NRA because he “doesn’t think we need guns in this country.” I guess violence is bad, except when it’s being used as a plot point to generate billions in revenue from such peaceful films as Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2, Grindhouse, Rambo, and Django Unchained. I’m not sure Harvey commands the moral high ground on this one. Pot, meet kettle.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. 2:30 PM. Everyone gripes and complains about early mornings. Those have always been pretty easy for me, even before long commutes and unholy start times turned me into a de facto morning person. The mid-afternoon is the part of the day I dread. It’s the time that turns me into a near catatonic meat sack. By the 2:30 mark on the typical weekday, I can’t pour coffee down my throat fast enough to do much more than keep up the basic appearance of not being asleep at my desk. Forget about being able to actually concentrate on something, I’m using all available power to keep myself from going face first into the keyboard. Fortunately, most days by about quarter of four, things start looking up a bit, happily just in time for the drive home. Although that’s convenient and all, it would be awfully nice not to feel like a zombie for a good third of every shift. Sadly, thus far, “more coffee” has not been the solution.

2. Price drops. I’ve noticed on the last few things I’ve ordered online, that a few days after I fork over my credit card number, the same item is available on the same site for slightly less than I paid for it. Of course most of these business are reputable establishments and would probably give me the discount if I spent 45 minutes finding my receipt, calling customer service, and complaining to two or three levels of CSR. Usually, though, the general hassle involved isn’t worth it to save the couple of dollars I’d end up getting back for the effort. Sometimes knowing time value and opportunity cost is a real pain in the ass.

3. iPhoto. I think it’s obvious that I’m deeply committed to the Apple family of products. My iPhone talks to my iPad which talks to my MacBook Pro which talks to my Mac Mini which talks to my AppleTV. Everything digital is basically available through any device all the time. It happens without much behind the scenes interface from me. And that makes me happy. But then we come to iPhoto, Apple’s dedicated photo management software. I’ll confess: I hate it. Like a good fanboy, I tried hard to like it, but I really do despise this little piece of software for not giving me control of the underlying file structure and letting me organize my pictures the way I had them filed on my PC in 2002. In this one little thing, Apple has made my life infinitely more difficult. I don’t need smart albums, or tags, events, or social media integration. I just need my photos stored in a logical file structure with folders, sub-folders, and sub-sub-folders that make sense to my OCD addled brain.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Customer service. On Tuesday morning, I drove an hour towards Baltimore expecting to transact a not insignificant amount of business with a well reviewed small local retailer. I originally planned to go in on Monday, but noted on their website that they were closed Sundays and Mondays. No harm no foul. Of course their site didn’t make any mention of the fact that they were also going to be closed on Tuesday this week. So I wasted two hours and burned half a tank of gas driving around north eastern Maryland on Tuesday for no apparent reason. As much as I’ll be the first to tell you that keeping up with a website is a pain in the ass, it seems to me if you’re going to bother to have one, it’s probably worth keeping the information up to date. Otherwise, as in this case, you’ve thoroughly annoyed a cash customer before they even walk through the door. I’ll probably still do business with this outfit because they’ve been recommended to me so highly, but it wouldn’t take much in the way of less than excellent service at this point to send me down the road to the next closest competitor.

2. Email. If anyone is wondering how I spent my first day at work after almost two weeks off, it was largely dedicated to reading, responding to, filing, or deleting 127 emails that rolled in over the Christmas-to-New-Years window. That’s not an exceptionally heavy load – it would have been far worse if I had taken off two weeks in say the middle of the spring. Look, I think it’s cute that there were a few people out there trying to get something done over the last two weeks, but since I wasn’t one of them, it’s going to take me a day or two to get back up to speed. Especially since I wasn’t exactly spending a lot of time pondering what important bit of email I was missing while I was away. Trust me when I tell you that sending me a follow up email the day I get back isn’t going to improve the response you’ll get. In fact it’s just going to make the process work more slowly for both of us. Now that I’m back in the saddle, it’s safe to assume I’ll work your issue in whatever priority it’s given by those elevated to positions higher than mine. In the meantime, have a cookie and get off my ass.

3. Attention span. I don’t know if it’s me or my surroundings, but lately my attention span feels like it’s all of about 37 seconds. That’s great for some things, I suppose, but I’d have a hard time listing what any of those might be. For purposes of reading, writing, or really trying to get anything done with any semblance of speed, it’s really kind of a hassle. I’d hoped that the new year would bring some kind of renewed focus. Unfortunately, it feels a lot like 2013: Part Two in that regard. As always, I’ll muddle through until the glitch works itself out.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Sure it might be a touch unseemly to throw together a post about the week’s annoyances the day after Christmas, but it’s Thursday and that’s just how I roll. Since I value consistency above almost all other things, not posting today would be pretty damned hypocritical of me. Of all the things you can call me, I’d like to at least avoid that one. With that said, here’s the final installment of WAJTW for 2013:

1. Reaching halfway. Realizing that you’ve reached the halfway point of your vacation sucks. Knowing that from here on out every new day brings you one sunrise closer to the drudgery of the workweek hangs as an unfortunate reminder over the time you have left to do what you will. Sure, it’s not a march to the gallows, but it’s still uniquely unpleasant in its own way.

2. Expectations. Since I know a little something about logistics, reading articles about how major delivery services like UPS and FedEx “screwed up” the holidays is always vaguely amusing. I’m pretty sure what people mean is that they didn’t order some key critical piece of Christmas swag until late in the day on December 23rd and then expect the shipping company to temporarily rescind the laws of physics in order to deliver this precious package “on time.” I know the sheer level of effort and mountain of technology that goes into moving a cardboard box from one side of the continent to another, but I’m not saying the transportation outfits are blameless. Still, I have to think if Mr. and Mrs. Christmas Shopper bothered to order even a day or two earlier, they could have saved themselves some angst. Then again, expecting a touch of personal responsibility at this festive time of year is probably a bridge too far.

3. Sitting around. I’m not a social butterfly by any stretch of the imagination. Still, somehow I manage to keep myself busy from morning until night most of the time. At the moment, I’m beginning to feel like I’ve radically under-planned this Christmas vacation. Once you’ve gotten accustomed from long years of practice to running your own show, calling your own shots, and dealing with life’s daily ephemera, there’s something vaguely unsettling about sitting around with nothing planned, nothing that needs immediate attention, and nothing that’s even close to routine.

Because it’s better…

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free-signI’ve heard all my life that it’s better to give than to receive. I’m not sure I’m convinced that’s necessarily true, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Starting right now and running through the end of the year, What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2012 in Review is available as a free download from Smashwords.

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