3 Things That Annoy The Tits Off Me

And a bonus one.

Before I start, I know these are all First World problems. That’s because the First World is where I live, and while I acknowledge the immense good fortune of that position the utterly trivial things still get on your tits (for those unfamiliar with this English expression, it denotes things that get under your skin and piss you off). In reality there’s probably about ten thousand and seventeen million of these — don’t even start me on the pronunciation of “quinoa”, or people mis-using the word “decimate” — but I’ll keep it to a random three.

Order-ahead in Starbucks

Some years ago Starbucks came up with a simply wizard notion and added the ability to order your drink or food ahead, using their app. I’m not sure why they thought this was a good idea: whether it was getting over-excited about new tech, or it’s supposed to be more “efficient”, or if the entire idea was conceived purely and simply to hack me off — but it’s only the last of these that’s worked.

Because what happens is that slackers, corporate eager beavers, and other social misfits do indeed order ahead, in their droves, but then take their own sweet time sashaying over to the Starbucks to pick their shit up. Yet the baristas prioritize the online orders, because god forbid some half-asleep student in pajamas or thrusting young exec who needs his or her tightly-specified drink to be ready literally the second they walk in, might have to wait for a moment, or they might complain on the socials.

So what then happens is the people who’ve actually bothered to rock up and make their order in the coffee shop, by saying things with their mouths, like the early frickin’ settlers — and are thus standing there like dummies, right now, in real life, ready and waiting for their goddamned drinks — wind up stuck behind a massive line of orders for people who stabbed it out with their thumbs on their phone from several miles away and might turn up to collect them at some point, or not, like, whatever, dude.

And so whose warm drinks and food meanwhile get cool, and cold drinks warm up, while I’m standing there like a lemon, empty-handed. Drives me nuts (and by extension also drives my son nuts, as he eye-rolls while I quietly rant about it every damned time we’re in Starbucks together).

Not least because it seems likely this system is not an attempt to make people’s lives easier — honestly, how hard is it to go into the store a couple minutes earlier and ask for what you want, in the place where it’ll be made: are you REALLY that busy???— but to get people used to the idea of an wholly-automated process where you never deal with a person at all but arrive to find the coffee sitting out in the parking lot.

Which leads me to…

Other things that are supposed to be cool and efficient but are actually only there because they save the company money, while inconveniencing the customer.

The ur-example of this was menu systems on phones. “How cool” we thought, way back in the day, “There’s a chipper-sounding recorded voice telling me which buttons to press and asking me for salient information, so when I’m connected with a human they’ll know all about my problem and be able to solve it instantly!”

Will they fuck. None of this prior information gets saved, and so you wind up — eventually, having been held at bay for minutes or hours or weeks, so the company can increase profits by hiring as few humans as possible — talking to a human who has absolutely no idea of what you want: who seems to have, in fact, even less idea than if you hadn’t doggedly handed over all this information previously: a human who in fact seems to have wandered in off the street moments earlier with no prior experience of the company, its business, or with interacting with humans in general.

Yes I know there’s two colons in the previous sentence. I’m that annoyed about it.

The most recent example to piss me off has been the escalating incidence of machine check-in at airports. It used to be only for domestic fights — and to be fair, if you only have carry-on, it’s nice and fast — but now the internationals are doing it too. You rock up, full of pre-flight jitters of one type or another (how long is security going to take, will the cat explode while we’re away, do I really have the passports or will that thing which looked like a passport earlier suddenly turn out to be something else, like a marmot), observe that it looks empty at the check-in desks, and surge towards one… only to be sternly held back by an air-flunky and told to start the process at a machine.

“But I’d like to do it with a person,” you say. “And look, there’s one right there — without a line.”

“No can do, loser — go tap in your information at the machine.”

“But then I’ll have to go see the human anyway, to hand over my suitcase, right? Can’t I just do both things at the same —“

“No. Begone to the machine. Or I’ll make your flight crash.”

Argh.

Password fields

God I hate these, especially the little dots that replace the password you’re either entering — or worse still — trying to create. I’m not an idiot, honestly. I’ll be able to spot if some sneaky villain in a mask is standing right behind me, craftily trying to spy on my password. I’ll especially notice it if it happens in my own fucking living room. So at the very least provide that little button that gives you the option to see what you’re pecking in, because otherwise you’re clearly just doing this to annoy me.

There’s a bigger and even more infuriating issue behind this, of course, which is that some humans are thieving bastards. This is also extremely annoying. Imagine what the world would be like if that wasn’t the case — if we could be trusted to not steal other people’s shit or in other ways harsh their mellows. We wouldn’t need locks, never mind passwords. Everywhere would have public restrooms that worked, because nobody would have recreationally smashed them apart. Happiness would abound.

Classic example. I was chatting with my pal Art and he recommended a movie on the Criterion Channel. Not for the first time. So I thought what the heck, signed up on their app. Went to the web version to more easily browse around what movies I could add to my watch list. But… it wouldn’t accept my password. The one I’d just made. So I typed it in again (didn’t work), and then cut and pasted it from where I’d made a note of it, in an app that doesn’t replace it with annoying dots, so it had to be right.

Nope, apparently, it’s wrong, despite the fact it’s not. So the site promises to send me an email to reset my password. BUT THEN DOESN’T.

I read a book instead.

Bonus Moan — changing things’ names for dumb reasons

There’s an in-depth interview with my wife coming up on Tuesday, but just to illustrate how tragically well-suited we are (Samuel Butler once wrote: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable instead of four”) we had a fine old time the other night complaining bitterly about name-changing.

Her example and complaint was that the herb Rosemary, which has been known since the dawn of time (and thus is remembered by herbalists) as Rosmarinus marianus, has been suddenly changed to Salvia rosmarinus, on the grounds that some bastard somewhere decided (wrongly, Paula hotly contests) that it’s a member of the sage family. Apparently it has been said of botanists that they’ve got nothing to do in the winter, so they spend their timing messing around with things’ names instead.

My example concerned the renaming (okay, re-renaming) of Proust’s three volume masterwork/snooze-fest. When I was growing up and read it, the title of C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s seminal English translation was “Remembrance of Things Past”. Lovely. But a while back it was decided that no, it should be called “In Search of Lost Time”.

I grudgingly acknowledge this is a more accurate rendering of the French “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” BUT the previous version was not only far more lyrical and poetic and appropriate, but also a quote from a Shakespeare sonnet (the 30th, which kicks off with the beautiful “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past” — thus killing two literary birds with one stone.

Okay, that’s really obscure and dull. I’ll stop talking.

So…

Lay it on me, whiners…

What are the little things about modern life that — whether they’re a big deal or not, and however petty or pretentious it makes you seem — make you see red?