Tag Archives: stupid

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Detroit. Apparently now indoor plumbing is a human right. At least according to the United Nations, who it seems wants the city of Detroit to provide water to everyone without regard to who has paid for the service and who hasn’t. And that’s where I have the problem, because you see, eventually someone will have to pay. The building and maintaining the infrastructure used to purify and delivery water certainly costs money. At some point, someone has to pay in order to keep the system running – typically that means those receiving the service (city water) pay for what they receive and when they stop paying they stop receiving. It feels like a pretty straightforward pay-as-you-go arrangement. But if the customer base stops paying, who picks up the tab? Whose responsibility is it to pay for something you use? The city? The state? The people who actually pay taxes and their utility bills. Surely we could just charge them a little bit more, no? We have a real problem in this country when huge swaths of society feel entitled to the fruits of labor that isn’t theirs. Detroit’s water woes are just the latest example of nice people being well intentioned, but inherently stupid.

2. Work versus email. The number of messages you send is a really shitty way to measure how much “work” you get done. A) It doesn’t take into account the length, complexity, or content of said emails. B) Being “busy” passing out electronic missives doesn’t mean you’re adding anything of value to whatever you’re engaged in. C) Chances are whoever receives your email is going to misinterpret at least part of it. Sending a lot of email is not a substitute for doing the work. More often than not it’s a sure sign that you’re spending too much time electronically “talking” and not enough time actually thinking.

3. Gaza. Despite what social media apparently want you to believe, the Palestinians and Israelis are not morally equivalent. For as long as there as been an Israel – actually since before then in British Mandate Palestine – they’ve been engaged in a fight for their national survival against a numerically superior foe whose stated ambition is to drive them into the sea. My take on the current Gaza situation is basically the same as if Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia decided Delaware was the odd man out and started hurling missiles into Wilmington. Expecting Delaware in this case to not use every resource at its disposal to make that stop happening would be ridiculous. It’s not the cool or popular stance these days, but I’m saying it out loud and in print: I stand with Israel. Our only real ally in the Middle East and the region’s only functioning democracy deserves at least that much.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The damned darkness. It’s been said that it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Still, all things considered, I’d rather be home before lighting the candles is necessary. I know it’s that fabulous time of year when the days are getting short and all, but I can’t help but think it would be awfully nice to get home in the afternoon before the photovoltaic sensors crank on the outdoor lights for the night. Plenty of daylight while I’m driving to the office in the morning is nice and all, but while I’m sitting in cubicle hell, it doesn’t make a lick of difference to me whether it’s blue skies and sunny or pitch black out there. Having an hour or two of daylight at the end of shift, though, would make all the difference in the world. You can keep Christmas. The winter holiday I’m most looking forward to at this point is the solstice.

2. Hand holding. Public displays of affection are fine, what makes me crazy are the allegedly professional members of society who need hand holding through every step of whatever it is they are supposed to be doing. I don’t have the time or the inclination to be your security blanket and dispense constant reassurance that you’re doing good work, or the right thing, or whatever other nonsensical prattle you need to hear multiple times a day to keep your little world from flying out of its orbit. Being a grown ass adult means you get to meet your own needs, not wander around looking for someone to meet them for you… because right now the only thing I can say you need for sure is a punch to the throat. That might not solve your problem, but it would sure as hell solve mine.

3. Everything else. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s causing it, but my general state of being could best be described as “annoyed” for most of the last week. While that may not sound surprising, the truth is actually do my best to ignore, or at least not engage with, most of what goes on around me. Observe it? Absolutely. Interact with it? Only when it’s unavoidable. I find that I’m much more at peace with the world and those in it when I hold the whole ball of wax at arm’s length. This week, though, I wake up pre-annoyed for some reason… although it saves me the trouble of needing to gin up a good level of rage later, it doesn’t exactly contribute to the smooth passage of the days. Sadly, that’s not a problem that can be fixed by the judicious application of more cowbell… unless you duct tape the cowbell to the person annoying you and then play it with a crowbar. That might actually help.

What Annoys Jeff This Week?

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I’m on a bit of a time crunch this evening so in no particular order, here they are:

1. The general public’s complete lack of awareness about what’s going on in the world when it happens more than 15 miles from wherever they happen to be at the time. World events are important if for no other reason than they are going to impact you whether you think they will or not. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing, some decision made as a result of current events is going to impact you, your family, your finances, and your country (not necessarily in that order). For the love of God, please start paying attention… or at least promise me that if you choose to stay ignorant you won’t show up to vote in November.

2. Time Management. Keeping a room full of people waiting for thirty minutes without anything in the way of explanation is bad form, no matter who you are. So yeah, you people with piss poor time management skills just figure out how to get it together. The rest of the world is tired of waiting on you.

3. Car Pooling. Riding with other people sucks. You don’t control the speed of travel, the temperature, or really any factor of the trip other than where you start from and where you’re going. Being dependent on other people’s schedule blows. Sure, carpooling decreases the number of people on the road and decreases emissions, but it’s just so bloody inconvenient. It’s legitimately nothing personal, I just don’t think I’d like carpooling with anyone. In the future, I think I’ll either fend for myself or find a reason to avoid the trip completely.

Priorities…

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I’m a simple man. All I need for a day’s work is an Internet connection and a bottomless supply of coffee. Take one of those things away and the day is suspect at best. Take away both and there’s really not much of a reason to get out of bed. Hey, I’m perfectly happy to sit in class all day, but scheduling the class in a room where the No Food or Drink Police monitor the place like a stalag, borders somewhere between foolish and evil. If you expect people to actually stay awake and at least attempt to focus, a coffee friendly zone is pretty much a necessity. As it is, I’ll probably just spend the rest of the week in an un-caffeinated haze. Please disregard my nodding head and puddle of drool on the floor.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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And here is your regularly scheduled installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week…

The Federal Hiring Process. I just received an email notice that an agency I applied to work for back in April (yes, that’s 8 months ago), has finally decided that they’re not going to hire for that vacant position. Really? I took some jackwagon eight months to decide that hiring into the teeth of massive budget cuts wouldn’t be a great idea? Brilliant. Give that man a promotion. This has got to be one of the top two or three reasons that people don’t list the federal government as one of their “wishlist” places to work. The process itself makes you question whether you’d want to work there in the first place.

Automatic Faucets. We have faucets at the office that turn on automatically when you hold your hands under them. It’s a neat bit of tech. Unfortunately, now I find myself standing in front of “old fashioned” sinks shaking my hands furiously wondering why the water isn’t flowing. Even though I use automatic doors from time to time, I still seem to be able to let myself in and out of the old fashion kind without any real trouble. You’d think the same basic technology applied so something I use as often as a sink wouldn’t leave me standing around pondering what the problem is on a regular basis.

The National Transportation Safety Board. As a group, Americans can be pretty dense… and we’re at our collective dumbest when we get behind the wheel of a car. I applaud the NTSB for wanting to keep is all safe, but will need them to do a reality check. In 2009 about 6000 people were killed by “distracted” driving. Four times more people die in this country die every year from unintentionally falling down. Falling. Down. Seriously. In terms of the big scary ways to die that are out there, distracted driving doesn’t seem like one that I’ll be spending an inordinate amount of time worried about. Besides, even if I weren’t texting, it’s just as likely that I’d be distracted by changing the radio, scratching my butt, talking to a passenger, or scarfing down a Big Mac. Then again, those are probably the next things the fine deciders at the NTSB will want to ban.

Criminal stupidity…

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Last week, one of my mortgage payments went down. Thinking I would do the prudent thing and reallocate the surplus to paying down the another that’s at a higher rate, I logged into the online banking center and changed my autopay settings on both accounts. At least that’s what I thought I did. In reality, I set a brand-spanking-new automatic payment for each of the two mortgages in question. That wouldn’t be so bad, of course, if you caught your mistake right away. It turns into a bit more of an issue when you miss the mistake for a few days and the bank deducts twice the normal payment from your account and leaves you with a balance of $4.37.

Since almost every bill I have is set up to automatically pay every month, I rarely look at the actual accounts any more. Which helps explain the near-epileptic fit I launched into when the bank sent me a friendly “low balance” email this morning. I’m glad to say that the bank was more than accommodating at getting the situation resolved, but that didn’t really help me feel like any less of a tool. Although I’m still glad I found out today and now three days from now when I stop by to pay the rent. Since I spend most says ranting about it, I thought it was only fair to call out my own bout of criminal stupidity. And now you know the rest of the story.

Doing stupid…

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I like to rant about stupid people. Anyone who’s read more than a post or two knows that. For the most part, I’m fussing about people who either a) don’t know they’re stupid, b) don’t care they are stupid, or c) some combination of the previous two. There’s another category that I don’t rail against nearly as often. Mostly because I have a tendency to be one of them.

There is, from time to time, the opportunity for someone who is otherwise intelligent to get up a head of steam and run headlong into a giant wall of stupid. Not because he doesn’t know the wall is there or because he thinks the wall will move, but out of a much more deep seeded desire to do stupid because somewhere in the middle of it, there’s probably going to be a good time involved. Usually doing stupid doesn’t involve more than a passing level of risk to health or welfare, and never involves anything approaching illegal, but like everything else we do, we assume some degree of risk when agreeing to take the ride.

There’s a fair chance that I’ll spend some part of the coming weekend heavily engaged in doing stupid. There’s an equal and opposite chance that it’s going to be a good time. But just in case, if I haven’t checked in over the next couple of days, send guns and money.

Seriously.

From Hell’s Heart, I Stab at Thee; or A Letter to the Field

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We built you a sports car. A machine with beautiful lines built for high speed and low drag, taking the best aspects of the past and melding them carefully with the best of the modern. We built you a Ferrari and then made the unpardonable mistake of handing you the keys.

You’ve stripped the gears with your towering incompetence. You’ve run at full speed into every pothole and ditch even close to the road. You’ve taken a thing of beauty and carved it into so many ill-fitting pieces it’s nearly impossible to tell there was any design at all.

My God, how I hate you. How I loathe you in your unerring stupidity. You’ve defined everything that is wrong about what we do. If there is any justice in this world or the next, you’ll have a special reservation in the 9th level of hell.

A rant on rails…

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I’ve never tried to run a railroad, but I love things that are organized, so I think I could make a pretty good show if it. Unfortunately, the people at Metro (who have been running a sort of “mini-railroad” for the better part of 30 years) seem to either have an intense hatred for organization or are simply incompetent. This, however, isn’t a rant specifically aimed at Metro’s leadership. Rather it is a rant pointed directly at the asshats who are my fellow riders.

The Green Line was delayed this afternoon due to some maintenance fuck-up down the track and as a result, trains were packed to capacity. Yet every time one pulled into the station, the great unwashed sea of humanity surged forward in an effort to cram themselves onto the already full cars… If you are getting the image of salmon leaping over themselves on their way up the rapids to their ancestral spawning grounds, you’re getting the right idea.

I’m never quite sure what thought goes through someone’s head when they think they are going to fit in the several inches of space between people already standing on the train. They apparently look in the mirror and have some sort of interesting disorder… their body image and the real world are completely at odds. I may be a pasty, white widebody, but I have enough of a concept of my own general dimensions to realize I am not going to fit in the 6-inch gap between some guys left shoulder and the door. Sometimes I wonder what actually goes on in people’s heads when they clearly are doing something stupid, but usually my give-a-shit isn’t strong enough to spend much time pondering on it.