Category Archives: Annoyances

Why do I keep doing this to myself?

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Soooo… UPS fucked us again. Didn’t ring the doorbell, and left an incomplete tag. The lady on the phone tells me that a signature is required in person. How would I know that, mister driver? I would have otherwise just left the tag out with a signature on the back, expecting my package to be left on Monday… But nooooo. Asshat. I was told they might try to deliver again today, because I guess I’m effective at complaining (you’d hope so, by now) (the trick is to make sure you don’t say anything at all that could make it seem like you were in any way at fault, because then they basically say “sucks to be you”). If so, I guess I’ll just go sit on the stoop all day or something. And slap the driver when he shows up.

If you have a package delivered by the USPS instead of UPS or FedEx, it still won’t get to your door, but at least they let you pick it up at the nearest post office. UPS or FedEx make us go to Buttfuck, Illinois to pick shit up. Buttfuck, Illinois, BTW, is not accessible by public transit, and guess who doesn’t have a car. So our packages are frequently returned to sender. Awesomeness.

And yeah, they just called me back. Guess I’ll be on the porch from 4:45-5:15pm.

I’m about to go wash my clothes in Lake Michigan

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My apartment building has just one urine-scented laundry room with just two washers and two dryers. I think this would be almost but not quite sufficient, if it wasn’t for this one Mexican dude who is in there constantly. And when I say constantly, I mean, I think it’s not impossible that he lives in the boiler room attached to it. I don’t know what his deal is, but I’m not even sure he lives in this building.

I have at least eleventy loads of laundry to do, and they could have been done by now, except that I’ve been having to do them one a day for the last week. This guy is in there every night, all night. He’s not done until 4 or 5 am, so unless I want to wait until then, I have to be sneaky to get a load in when he’s not looking. Because he can’t be polite and use only one machine, leaving one for somebody else. Ohhh, no.

I’ve come to the conclusion that either there are 43 Mexicans living in one of these units, and he’s the designated laundry whore, or he’s got some kind of Mexican ghetto laundry service scam going, or he does in fact live in the boiler room, and figures running the machines all night for $1 each qualifies as rent. Yesterday at 7pm, though, he asked me to hold the door open for him, because he wanted to get his bike. Sounded a bit suspicious to me, since if he wanted his bike, maybe he should have brought his key instead of waiting around outside the laundry/bike room until someone let him in, huh. So I hung around outside for a while. Never came out with a bike, big surprise. Probably just the beginning of his shift. When he’s in there, he flips the deadbolt so the door can’t close and lock.

The other annoying thing is that whenever he’s doing laundry (so, all the time), he stands around outside the room instead of going back inside his supposed apartment. Sometimes with several other Mexicans. Often drunk. Look, guys, it takes a lot of effort to avoid people all day and be this anti-social. Stop making me acknowledge you. All of his laundry bags are numbered. What are the numbers for? Does he have so many kids that he can’t remember them all? And if he ever happens to leave a machine empty for five minutes, he unplugs it, so people will think it’s not working (I, however, am not a moron, and am not fooled). Is he just an asshole, or what.

I don’t know what any of this means. I suppose I could question him one of these days, but I have a strict policy of never talking to people, and besides, it’s much more fun to imagine sinister motives, and get more and more passive aggressive because I have a veritable mountain of dirty clothes chilling out in my room that I can’t do anything about. Anyway, I don’t speak Spanish, and he doesn’t speak very much English.

Sean says maybe he’s laundering money.

Ho ho ho. Good one.

I’m just going to walk around naked from now on. Less freakin’ hassle. As long as I stay inside, anyway.

Microsoft, why do you want me to firebomb your headquarters?

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Reset Always Ask Before Opening This Type Of File Check Box in Vista IE » My Digital Life

[I]f you untick or unselect the checkbox of “Always ask before opening this type of file” option before clicking on save or open the downloaded files, the next time you attempt to download a file with same file type or extension IE will automatically start to download and then perform the selected action (either save or open) when finished. […]

In Windows Vista running IE7 […] there is no longer an option to reset or change this behavior to the normal default again through the usual GUI.

Whose bright idea was this!?

I was searching Google to figure out where the hell in the menus they’d moved this option, because I sure as hell couldn’t find it. I didn’t expect that they’d have gotten rid of it completely!

PS to the people who will inevitably show up here looking for the solution to the problem… Click the link above. Bleah.

Woo is invading my personal space

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I’ve recently encountered one of more real-life believers of the following woo lies: homeopathic “medicine“, acupuncture, colon cleansing, raw food diets, organic-only diets, detox diets, vitamin C and echinacea for colds, cupping, “The Secret“, psychic powers, ghosts, 9/11 conspiracies, astrology, and various gods (to name only a few).

I know how to handle these sorts of people online — a) ignore them (best option), b) ridicule them (more entertaining option), c) attempt to reason with them (complete waste of time). In person, however, I’m usually at a bit of a loss. How ought I to respond to someone who brings any of these things up in the course of normal conversation?

My first instinct is to hijack the small-talk and start a conversation about science, logic, common sense, and how they person involved has managed to avoid all of these. I don’t usually mean to do it. I think my “mistake” is to reply to them with a phrase like “homeopathic medicine doesn’t work” as opposed to “I don’t believe in homeopathic medicine”. Ugh.

Well, actually. Reply #1 leads to an argument. Reply #2 leads to the response “well it works for me, and it’s better for you than that stuff with all the chemicals in it”, which leads to my brain exploding, and reply #1 escaping my mouth anyway. This just gets me labelled as a know-it-all. A know-it-all who is perceived to be wrong, in fact — the most annoying sort!

Taking homeopathy as an example, most people I run into who believe in it don’t even know what it is! Many of them seem to assume that it is a synonym for “natural” or “organic”, and have been led to believe that both of these are synonyms for “healthy”. Clearly, since healthy is good, homeopathy is win!

Trying to unravel the layers and layers of BS that got someone to the point of believing in something as completely nutty as homeopathy is practically impossible, especially since people don’t like to be wrong, and will usually get angry or demand to change the subject before any reason leaks into their brain.

Should I just brush off subjects like these when they come up, and go insane slowly and silently from having to endure woo quietly, when every neuron in my brain wants to attack it, or should I continue to be the know-it-all bitch. Is there some third option I’ve missed? Getting together every rational person I can find, and evacuating us to another planet, say?

Gnomes

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Does anybody know of an effective way to trap gnomes? My apartment seems to have a rather bad infestation. I haven’t seen them so far, but just this week several things have gone missing. An MP3 player and my wallet being the big ones, but any random thing I’ve happened to be looking for has been curiously absent as well. The MP3 player could have been lost anywhere, but the wallet was never taken out of the apartment — I haven’t been using the purse it fits into, and have been taking the cards out and putting them loose into my smaller purse (at least that means I didn’t lose anything important IN the wallet). There haven’t been any shady or unsupervised people in the apartment, and besides, what would anyone want with a bottle of Lysol, a spool of black thread, some pink barrettes, or a couple of 18g needles? It could only be gnomes. I’m convinced of it. I’m not one of those people that misplaces things. The table beside our bed, the desk, and the bathroom closet all look like tornadoes hit them, but I know exactly what’s there, and exactly where it is. So now I need to capture and torture these gnomes, and get them to give my stuff back. Advice, please.

Noise Control

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Part of my neighbourhood is a quiet zone, because there are lots of old, dying people living there. So, why does the church down the road get away with it’s damned ding-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-ding-ding fifty-seven times every day? It’s fuckin’ annoying, is what it is (and a poor excuse for music, I can tells ya). I have a hunch that if I decided to get up on top of my building and ring some loudassed bells every morning when reasonable people were still trying to sleep, I might get myself into a bit of trouble. Goddamned church!

Everything beyond my door annoys me

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Pedestrians need street signs, too, City of Chicago. Or are we meant to walk in only one direction on one way streets, as well, hm? The street signs on on the part of Grand I was walking on this afternoon face oncoming traffic only, and since that traffic was westbound, and I was walking east, it was a little bit annoying to figure out the cross-streets, since I had to cross to the east side of the intersection first. Dumb.

Oh, also… I’m back in Chicago for the foreseeable future. Not that I’m psychic, so I can’t foresee very far into the future at all. In fact, I can’t foresee at all. So rather, I’m back in Chicago for the time being, and will be here in from now on with a probability of 1 for the present, and declining at a rate that I don’t know enough about anything to determine towards a probability of 0 at some time in the future. Or something. Whatever. Hi again, Internet.