What makes you irrationally annoyed?
Absurd answers only!
Every time my husband and I go out to eat at a nice restaurant, he comments on the temperature of the butter at the table. This has nothing to do with quirkiness on his end, he’s just been around me long enough to know that I am, more likely than not, judging the quality of our dinner spot by that exact factor.
Spreading ice cold butter onto a delicious piece of warm, fresh bread is a crime. It clumps up the bread, the butter goes tasteless above room temperature, and it tells me all I need to know about attention to detail in that particular dining room.
I know it sounds extreme, but cold butter at a nice restaurant makes me irrationally annoyed. In the same vein as random snobbery, this particular pet peeve has no deep origin or righteous justification. It just annoys the hell out of me. It’s like that feeling when you’re walking down the hall and your purse strap gets caught on a door knob and you jerk on it and cuss. Cold butter = same feeling!
Once that little butter example pattered through my mind, I had a fun time thinking through the other little things that irk me irrationally. I figured I’d share a few for laughs and I hope if we ever cross paths you’ll share yours with me. I tried asking a few friends about their random snobberies after that issue and it was hit! Consider this conversation prompt number 2.
Hotel toilet paper
Here’s a little fact about me. One of the first things I do in a hotel room is walk into the bathroom and look at the toilet paper roll. If it’s not a new roll, I get the ICK. I’m instantly annoyed. Yes, I know that hotel rooms have been used by hundreds, maybe thousands of people before me. I don’t want to think about that. I want to live in a fantasy world where I’m the first person to ever stay in any hotel room. And, so that I can go on living in a fantasy world, I need the toilet paper roll to be crisp and still wrapped in paper. I knnnnoooow that it’s wasteful to throw away good TP. And, most of the time, I do not get my wish. So, I’m irrationally annoyed as soon as I see a half-used roll and my brain conjures up all the butts that have sat in that very spot. At a minimum I’ll take a folded down corner. Just so I know that someone came in and felt bad that the paper roll was used and tried, just a little, to make it better.
Talking in a movie theater
I try to make it a habit to never ask my husband what annoys him about me. Gotta keep things a little mysterious and all that. But one thing I know drives him up a wall is my reaction to people talking at a movie. I realize what I’m about to type puts me halfway down the road to Karen-ville but we’ve all got a little Boomer inside.
When someone is talking during a movie, I make zero effort to hide my complete and utter annoyance. I will turn around and look at you several times. I will stare. I will say “shhh” if I have to. When I do these things my husband practically melts into the seat to get away. But I can’t help myself! From my point of view I paid for an experience—a quiet one. I want to be transported while I’m at the movies, not hear your theories about how it’ll end. I realize at some point, I may get my ass kicked for any of the behaviors I mentioned above. It’s irrational annoyance, not perfectly logical!
Just to reassure you that I’m not a total nut at the cinema, my husband (aka the black pot to my kettle) just about loses his mind when people take out their phones to glance at them during a film. The flash of light in a dark theater seems to do to him what all those fervent whispers do to me. Tomato, tomahto.
Plot twists
My husband told me that this next one “actually makes zero sense.” When a show we’re watching takes a turn I don’t like, I lose interest almost immediately. It doesn’t matter if we’ve invested months into a show, even years. If the writers make a call that I hate, I’m done. I’m so annoyed that I can’t conjure even a nugget of curiosity about what will happen next.
A perfect example is show The Wire. We watched the entire series, painstakingly over months (it’s a brilliant show but it’s long, heavy, and intense). Even though that show is decades old, I won’t spoil it for you but something weirdly surprising and kind of anticlimactic happens to a beloved character in the last season. The instant it happened, all drive to finish the show evaporated from my body. It makes me laugh even now just thinking about how utterly disgusted and annoyed I was by the turn of events on that fateful episode. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy a juicy plot twist. BUT if something happens that, to me, feels out of left field for a character I feel like I’ve gotten to know or something that happens that feels totally off-color from the usual tone of show, I’m instantly checked out. Too bad those really successful show runners didn’t ask my opinion first.
I got some fun emails in response to Random Snobberies and I hope I’ll hear from you on this topic, too. Talk soon!
Still thinking about…..
Discovered designer Maria Elena Villamil and swoon! The dresses! The jackets!
A small business that I love just started selling kids’ lunch boxes and they are so cute!
Waterproof fashion jewelry with a lifetime guarantee sounds too good to be true but I’m thinking of grabbing this piece from Electric Picks to see what the fuss is about
Thoroughly enjoyed this Armchair Expert episode with Amy Poehler; she had a lot of wise words
Speaking of podcasts, one more plug for my brilliant friend Clara’s pod that I was interviewed on last week
My husband and I got sucked into this ridiculous show and now we can’t stop