Category Archives: What Annoys Jeff this Week?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Office politics. Henry Kissinger once said, “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” Dr. Kissinger is a smart guy, but his thinking was too small in this case. His principle ultimately includes office politics of any stripe. Fighting over who gets credit, who’s in charge, and for the seat next to the high lord at supper are exactly the factors that prevent anything from actually getting accomplished. Useless bloody infighting over scraps is apt to make me say something stupid.

2.Colo-rectal examination. I don’t care how good a professional relationship you have with someone, the people you work with never need to hear the explicit details of your upcoming and/or previous colo-rectal examination. Some things are best left within the confines of doctor-patient confidentiality.

3. The 5-day work week. Whoever decided that the work week should be five days and the weekend only two needs punched in the face. Repeatedly. With a Buick.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Kids that drink hand sanitizer. What’s wrong with kids today? Back when I was coming up, we had the good sense to respect ourselves and steal miniatures of Seagram’s 7 and Canadian Club that our parents forgot were packed away in the back of the basement. In a pinch we’d even go so far as to make friends with someone older and let them hook us up. We were practitioners of creative acquisition, by God. It’s time someone steps in and teaches these youngsters that life is just too damned short to drink bad alcohol.

2. America’s puritanical streak. The Secret Service really stepped in it a few weeks back, make no mistake about it. I think they embarrassed themselves badly. Unlike the morality crusaders out there, though, I don’t think their embarrassment had anything to do with consorting with hookers. What happens between two consenting adults doesn’t mean a hill of beans to me. If you want to gig these guys over something, how about trying to flash their badge and use their position to get out of paying the bill? If two people want to trade money for sex, that’s between him, her, and the laws of that particular jurisdiction. I’ve never understood why I should care as long as its legitimately consensual. Sadly, America’s puritanical streak is once again showing itself to be alive and well at the mere thought that someone might have fornicated. If you want to get riled up, be mad because one of the agents was a cheap bastard, not because people had sex. It’s like we’ve got the national mentality of a room full of fifth graders.

3. Information Dominance. Every time I see that phrase written somewhere, I’m reminded of how many times a day my computer freezes, loses files, can’t connect to the printer, or thinks the internet doesn’t exist. Information dominance? Meh. I’d settle for desktop mediocrity.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. North Korea. What on earth possesses us to go to the negotiating table with this backwards-assed country that’s more interested in lobbing missiles into the ocean that it is in feeding its own people or keeping its electricity flowing. If the Dear Leader wants to spend every spare dime he can scrape together on arms and armaments, it’s time we focus on nothing more than containing them north of the cease fire line. Eventually, the North Korean people are going to get tired of starving and essentially living in the 19th century. When they do, we should do everything possible to support them. In the meantime, we should stop throwing good money after bad.

2. Good ideas. I’m not opposed to having them, I just wish they would come along when I have time to do something with them rather than just scribbling them down and hoping to get back to them at some point.

3. People who can’t figure out the basics of using a toll booth. If you’re in the lane with the giant purple sign that says “EZPass Only”, there’s a pretty damned good bet that you’re going to need an EZPass to get through the gate. If you for some reason don’t have that wonderful little transponder, you’re going to be stuck in the lane waiting for someone to wander over from one of the booths that is designated for taking actual cash money. More importantly, the guy behind you in the big red truck is going to lose is bloody mind and have his blood pressure skyrocket into decidedly unsafe territory.

4. New computer day at the office. I’m totally excited to get a new PC for work. And then I realize it’s just as crippled by security software, blockers, scans, and bloatware as the computer I’m getting rid of. At least there are no scuffs on it and the battery seems to work. That’s something.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Wi-Fi. If you’re going to go to the trouble of installing building-wide wi-fi connectivity, it might be a good idea to actually let people in the building know what the password is. Otherwise you’re just beaming radiation at us all day long for no apparent reason. Mmmkay?

2. Assumptions. Just because I’m sitting in class typing something on my laptop, doesn’t mean that I’m not paying attention to whatever you’re saying up there in the front of the room. You’re just going to have to trust me on that one. Calling on me to give an opinion on whatever topic you’re discussing isn’t really going to give me much trouble. That’s not a critique of your skills as an instructor so much as it is a function of having covered this material half a dozen times in other classes.

3. Laundry. How can one guy generate four full loads of laundry a week? And before anyone asks, no, that’s not “separated”. That’s four filled to the brim loads of whatever I can cram into the machine to avoid having a fifth load magically appear. There simply has to be a better way to spend your life than just wandering around picking up after yourself.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Team Building Activities. It’s pretty rare that I run into a topic on which I can’t speak with at least some degree of confidence. I discovered this week while developing and delivering a group presentation titled “How to Change a Diaper” that almost anything related to the care and maintenance of a human baby is apparently one of those topical areas with which I am completely unacquainted. I’m happy to give the presentation, but ecstatic to leave the details and task execution to others. In this case, ignorance truly is bliss.

2. Sleep. Yes, I know this is one that crops up from time to time, but it’s been worse this week than most. In your standard day, you only get 24 hours and to be frank, I’m not willing to give up any more than 1/4 of it on just laying around essentially unconscious. It’s not that I’m exceptionally busy or feel that anything I’m doing is especially important, just that I think there are better ways to spend the day that being quietly tucked into a warm bed. Lately, though, the standard six hours hasn’t really felt like enough. I probably just need to find a way to crank more caffeine into the system to overcome the increased coefficient of drag.

3. The media. Again. For the last week or so, they’ve been filling the television set with the story of an overzealous and potentially crazy neighborhood watch captain gunning down an innocent kid on his way home from the corner store. Other outlets are screaming that the kid wasn’t as innocent as we’re being lead to believe. Either way, it makes a good story and a nifty bit of narrative for the media to run with. What none of the stories do, though, is tell me exactly what happened. Personally, I’m reserving judgement until more than speculation is known. We were once a nation of laws rather than a media drive lynch mob. It’s a pity that’s not still the case.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Anyone who is surprised that cocaine killed Whitney Houston. Instead of banner headlines on the news sites, maybe “Well, duh” buried on page 10 next to the ad for weekend specials at Donny’s Pancake House and Truck Stop would be slightly more appropriate.

2. People driving on a weekday afternoon like they don’t have a place in the world to be. I get that not everyone flies out the door at the end of the day at a dead sprint like I do, but still I’d think if you’re on the road during what approximates rush hour in northeastern Maryland you’d have some place you were trying to go. Apparently, though, there are a sizable contingent of people who are just out to have a look the scenery. In a Tharp administration, these people will be subject to targeting and neutralization by armed Predator drones circling high above major commuter routes. Sure, this might cause some additional delays, but at least those slow downs would have a legitimate reason for happening.

3. People who show up to things unprepared. I can’t throw down with the best slackers around when I set my mind to it, but one thing I never do is show up to a meeting or other activity without having a reasonable command of the subject matter. It doesn’t take that much effort to do your homework ahead of time. There’s a special place in hell reserved for people who wander in and waste two or three hours of your life because they don’t have a clue what’s going on around them.

4. It takes Friday entirely too long to show up every week. I think That one is pretty much self explanatory. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to start my three-day weekend. And in case you’re wondering, no, that last part does not annoy Jeff.

What annoys Jeff this Week?

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Honestly? Not much. The Tundra is back in the driveway, I was in and out of the MVA in about five minutes to order replacement tags (the front plate folded like an accordion in the recent unpleasantness), and I’m ticking off the minutes until it’s time to crawl out of bed and line up for a tasty new piece of electronic kit. The long weekend is underway.

Getting back in the truck is honestly more satisfying than I thought it was going to be. It feels like a good solid step back in the direction of normal. Getting use to the sheer mass of that vehicle again is going to take a bit of time. That’s what you call a good problem. I’m so happy not to be looking up at everything else on the road I can hardly stand myself.

So yeah, what annoys Jeff this week? Not much at all. It’s one of those rare moments when I’m reminded just how lucky I am. Don’t get use to it.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The dead zone. Although they swear it’s unintentional, the building where I work is essentially a giant Faraday cage. Outside in the parking lot, five solid bars of 3G coverage. Inside, at my desk, with my phone pressed against the glass, one bar of intermittent EDGE coverage. Sometimes. If all the atmospheric conditions are just right. I don’t want to sit at my desk playing Angry Birds all day, but it would at least be nice to know who called when the “you have a voicemail” alert manages to fight its way through to my phone. Mostly though, you just get to be surprised by the texts, emails, and voice messages that come rolling in whenever you happen to go outside. Maybe I should just set everything to roll over to my Google Voice account and really freak the IT security weenies out.

2. Forgetting the airbags. For the last two weeks, I’ve been mentally preparing myself to get the truck back on Friday. It’s not that the rental car is awful, but well, it’s not my truck and not being able to see anything further than the tail end of the car in front of me lacks a certain charm. I called Monday and everything was still on track for a Friday pickup. When I called to check in this afternoon, apparently there’s been a snag. A very sheepish office manager confessed that they had forgotten to include replacing my deployed airbags in the original repair estimate and had therefor not ordered them. I’m not a fancy big city auto body shop, but I think I would have noticed the big white deflated bits hanging out of the steering wheel and from under the dash. Maybe it’s just me though. The parts are ordered and the truck is allegedly back together now, so as soon as they get there hands on the airbags, we should be all set. As of a few hours ago, Tuesday is the new Friday.

3. Iran. Part of me is stunned and amazed that we’re going to fiddle around and wring our hands and wait just long enough for Iran to make their very own nuke. The other part of me then remembers that it’s a government operation and then all of me ceases to be surprised. Boy if you thought groups like the Taliban were dangerous before, just wait until their friends get the bomb. The world is going to change and while we had a chance to stop it or at least stand aside while someone else stopped it, we sat around fretting about convincing our enemies that stopping the madness was a good idea. A hundred years from now, the world is going to look back at this generation of “leaders” and collectively ask WTF, dude?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. FM Radio. I’ve had a satellite radio account since back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the state of the art was a receiver mounted to the air conditioning duck and an antenna wire snaking out the window to a magnetic antenna. After the better part of a week tooling around in a car without Sirius, I can honestly say that normal radio is actually worse than I remember it being. Constant commercials, bad reception, God awful “morning zoos” on just about every channel, there’s clearly a reason that broadcast radio is a free “service.” If nothing else, this brief time off satellite has proven to me the value of being able to toggle between the BBC, any genre of music I can even think of wanting to listen to, a dozen news/talk stations, and the need to get an occasional Howard Stern fix. I’ll try to remember that the next time I notice the bill come in.

2. The Network. Reliable 24×7 high speed internet isn’t a luxury item in the 21st century. Sure, maybe if you’re a moisture farmer somewhere in the third world, dial-up is good enough but if you’re a knowledge worker who trades in ideas it’s like trying to make a phone call with duct tape over your mouth. Unless “I’d love to do whatever random task you want me to handle today, but can’t because I can’t see the interwebs” becomes an legitimate excuse for falling off timelines, it’s really falls to the employer to ensure network availability on more than three days out of five. Sure SkyNet might have destroyed civilization, but at least it didn’t collapse into an unusable mass of Network Errors every couple of hours.

3. #FirstWorldProblems. I’ve run across a spate of articles lately decrying the fact that so much of what we Westerners b*tch and complain about are “First World Problems” and wanting us collectively to me more attuned to ongoing plights like famine, pestilence, war, and plague. Let’s go ahead and get one thing straight right now. As a rule, I am opposed to most of the aforementioned issues. However, since I happen to live in the developed world, the things that annoy me on a regular and recurring bases are going to tend to be, by definition, first world problems. And here’s the kicker: I’m OK with that. I’m just a guy trying to do a job and have some semblance of a life. Every now and then I do my bit for the poor, downtrodden, diseased, or hungry by kicking out a check to the charity of my choice. So stop trying to lay down a massive guilt trip on everyone. There’s nothing anyone can tell me that’s going to make me feel compelled to go wandering around some backwater village in a part of the world not even the State Department has heard about on a quest to stomp out GonoHerpiSyphilAids.