Archive for Pet peeve

New Pet Peeve

{ July 1, 2007 @ 11:00 pm } · { Instant Messaging, Internet, Pet peeve }
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I like to think of myself as an ever-evolving personality always on the look-out for new ways of seeing things, new ways of thinking about things.  Thus I have changed my pet peeve.  It’s a pet peeve that wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago.  After all, not many people hang up the phone without giving some indication that they are going to do so.  Unless they are angry but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

My pet peeve is people who you are chatting with online and are suddenly gone.  No goodbye, no ‘I have to answer the door’, no explanation at all.  They are just gone.  You write a sentence and there is no response.  They could be dead for all you know.  It is the height of rudeness. 

I know a charmingly arrogant person whom I occasionally chat with and even he has the decency to say goodbye when he signs off (one should not be arrogant unless they have good manners!).  But others who I will not name are just gone – poof!  I ususally chat with them again to see if it was just an oversight on their part but it usually isn’t. 

Apparently to some people chatting online is not really talking to a person, it’s just venting ones thoughts and ideas to a computer that has the strange ability to understand what one is saying, and then leaving when they’ve had enough. 

And before you go and think that it’s perhaps something I said, please believe that it’s not.  Usually my last sentences are just as innocuous as any other during the ‘conversation’. 

So for all of you who have the good manners to tell someone when you are signing off – thank you.  It’s appreciated.

Good-bye ;)

Pet Peeve

{ April 21, 2007 @ 8:07 pm } · { Brother, Funny, Myself, Pet peeve, Uncategorized }
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Before I launch into the description of my pet peeve I must say a few things.  It struck me as I opened this page and thought about what I was going to write that all I ever seem to talk about is silly, mundane, day-to-day nonsense that is of no benefit or indeed consequence to the world at large.  When I combined this realization with the fact that I was about to compound my superficiality by bleating about my personal pet peeve, well, I was somewhat ashamed. 

It was at that point that I recalled that my brother is the author of one of the more intellectually stimulating, contemporary, and open-minded blogs on this site (Doug’s Darkworld).  With this in mind I decided (rationalized) that since he has all the important stuff covered, I should be free to babble on to my heart’s content.  There’s nothing I can say about the state of the world that he hasn’t said or won’t say in the future.  Plus, he is much more intelligent than I, so I’m not even going to embarrass myself by trying. 

I’m afraid to even leave a comment on his blog for fear of looking like an idiot.  For instance, I read his blog today about gun control, and what’s going on in the middle east, etc, etc.  But do you want to know what I found the most interesting thing about the blog?  He began a paragraph with the sentence ’snort’.  That was it – one word, ’snort’.  I laughed for five minutes over that one – puts ‘jesus wept’ to shame. 

Moving along I simply must expound upon my pet peeve.  Perhaps by exposing it to the light of day it will cease and desist its unending torture of me.  Picture this:  I’m in bed, I’m reading a novel, I become sleepy, I reach over and grab my bookmark to save my place for the next evening.  What bookmark?  There’s no bookmark.  It’s certainly not on the pillow next to me where I carefully placed it (in an attempt to foil the bookmark Gods), it’s not on my bedside table, it’s not on my chest, and it’s not on the blankets next to me.  I feel the sleepiness I had cultivated with a hour’s reading slowly dissolve into a fit of rage.  Up come the sheets, the blankets, the pillow is thrown thither, the book yon, and then suddenly the bookmark is there.  Innocently resting upon the bed as if it had been there all along.  This, dear friends, is my pet peeve.