MisterShouty

I’ve vented on several occasions about annoyances of office life, but a particularly lengthy occurrence of one office irritation this morning has reminded me that this is possibly the worst thing that I’m forced to endure in this environment.

Every office has meeting rooms. Their purpose is clear from the name – they’re for meetings! They are dedicated, closed off areas in which people can gather to have their discussions about anything and everything that needs discussing without disrupting the working day of anyone else in the building.

That in mind, why the fuck do so many people feel the need to hold their meetings at their desks, in the middle of the office causing maximum disruption to everyone around?

Is it simply a complete lack of consideration?
Is it a feeble attempt at marking territory, asserting authority?
Or is it a conscious decision to be the most annoying cunt they possibly can be?

It seems that these people always choose to congregate at a desk right by mine, having their supposedly important meeting and yelling at each other as loud as they can, creating a din that not even a good set of in-ear headphones can drown out. And to compound the annoyance further, the yelling is not even due to disagreements or the need to be heard over any other office noise. It’s just shouting for the sake of shouting, even though everyone they’re shouting at is less than 3 feet away from them.

All of this is bad enough, but another layer of mind-cracking irritation is added by the fact that, when one meeting starts up with the unnecessary shouting, there is always another that gathers within a minute or so and attempts to out-shout the first. This unbelievable row goes on for at least 15 minutes and leaves the ears of everyone around ringing for the rest of the day.

As unbelievable as it sounds, this phenomena isn’t even restricted to groups. The introduction of Skype to the office place as a means of communication with people off-site has led to the solo “Yelling Meeting”. People now initiate a Skype call with someone off site at 9am and sit yelling at them all fucking day. They’re using headphones of course, so all we hear is the one sided drone of banal everyday conversation, but at that annoying volume that everyone seems to speak when using a hands-free kit of any kind!

It’s becoming more and more impossible every day to achieve anywhere near the level of concentration required to do your job properly in an office environment.

I actually have a pair of earplugs in my desk drawer now – Headphones clearly aren’t up to the job, so these have become a necessity.

As you can see, they’re bright yellow, so hardly inconspicuous. Hopefully the message will get through, but I’m afraid that these office yellers aren’t the kind of people that notice anything around them that doesn’t actually directly involve them. They will happily witter on all day every day without it even occurring to them that they may be disrupting someone else’s work.

My only consolation is that they’ll provide me with the first few easy kills when I finally snap and bring a shotgun to the office!

Posted in General Misery, People Skills

Nothing makes my blood boil more than people who just don’t listen when they are being spoken to. I don’t mean people that end up catching the wrong end of the stick because they’re only half-listening. They’re a totally different kind of irritation. I mean people that are so wrapped up in their own world that any sound in their vicinity is blocked out to such an extent that you practically have to hit them with a stick to get their attention.

I wouldn’t mind if these people were only in this little bubble of their own making when they’re engaged in a difficult task, but that is simply not the case. They are just ignorant, arrogant arseholes.

“Nothing that anyone can possibly have to say is of any interest to me. I am doing something far more important than anything else can possibly be. Should anyone need my wise, superior ears, they can just wait.”

Well, fuck you.

I know several people with whom I could easily start every conversation with “Ask me to repeat myself, fuckwad” without them ever noticing … because they don’t make any effort to pay attention. They can’t rip their limited attention from one task to another and their first contribution to every conversation with everyone they talk to is ALWAYS “Say again.”

And even worse – I’m often forced to endure the company of TWO of this particular kind of idiot while they’re trying to talk to EACH OTHER. Every sentence from one to the other is followed by an “Eh?” or a “What?” … and I’m forced to hear them repeat themselves over and over again simply because they don’t have the common courtesy to engage in a conversation properly.

I sometimes think that I’m a rare exception within the human race. Not only am I one of the few that is actually aware of his surroundings … actually paying attention to the people around him, but I do actually care about what people have to say to me!

I can honestly say that my ears are indeed always ready for someone to talk to me! Not like these people that seem to need a prod just to get them out of standby, so they can force their brains awake and start listening to the person speaking to them 2 sentences in!

There is no excuse for this level of self-involved ignorance. I’m sure you’d hear every word if I was talking about what I did to your momma last night.

Posted in General Misery, People Skills

If I had to choose the one thing about working in an office that pisses me off on a daily basis, it would have to be the way so many people ALWAYS leave their mobile phones on their desks and let them ring and fucking ring non-stop.

The clue is in the name, shithead. It’s a MOBILE phone.

Does it not occur in your tiny little brain that it belongs in your pocket rather than on your desk – while you are wondering about in a different room, in a meaningless meeting or touching yourself in the toilets.

Not to mention that the worst offenders in this category are the ones with the shittiest ringtones imaginable. Built-in, factory-setting nokia ringtones that are not only monotonously dull but also blare out in that annoying frequency and volume combination that makes your damn teeth vibrate … Crappy pop-song ringtones, obviously chosen in some vain attempt to seem “down with the kids” or some such bollocks.

Plus, it’s always accompanied by the noise of the fucking phone vibrating against the desk like it’s an overworked battery-powered appliance from the underwear drawer of a religious, yet particularly sinful librarian.

Believe me, there is nothing more irritating or less endearing to have a workmate’s phone buzzing and buzzing while blasting out the chorus of Rihanna’s latest abortion of a song. The very fact that you’ve chosen to torture us with such a ringtone warrants a hammer being carefully applied to your handset. And if you catch me on a bad day, your testicles.

So please, for the love of God, try to let it seep into that neanderthal skull of yours that it’s a MOBILE phone.

Pick it up or silence it. Or you may just find it unable to ring at all the next time you return to your desk.

Posted in General Misery, People Skills

There’s an often-repeated cliche that, when you take driving lessons, you’re learning to pass the test, not learning to drive … and that, once the test is passed, you then start the real phase of learning.

I’ve found this to be completely true. Since passing my driving test several months ago, I’ve learnt many things about every aspect of driving. But nothing that I have learned has come across quite so strongly as the realization of the simple fact that there is no such thing as “Road Rage“.

Oh yeah, there are angry drivers. People that would just as soon punch you in the face as let you in front of them onto the motorway when you’re coming off a sliproad. People that will chase you up the outside lane, where you’re already going way faster than you technically should and flash at you, forcing you over into the middle lane … only to pass you, then pull in right in front of you and slow down to 60.

But even in the face of this kind of stupid behaviour, I’ve not even been close to “Road Rage“. Surely, if it’s a legitimate “illness“, it has the potential to affect everyone … rather than being limited to the element of society that’s already in need of a serious dose of valium!

Arseholes invade our every day life on a regular basis and this has nothing to do with being behind the wheel of a car.

If a person is rude, obnoxious and generally filled with hate whilst driving, chances are they are exactly the same in every other situation with which life presents them. Their attempts to justify their complete self-centred arrogance and bad-tempered behaviour by pretending they’re only wankers whilst driving is nothing but a thinly veiled admission of guilt.

The very idea of this behaviour being caused by the situation is busted wide open when we consider that a whole flock of other “something-rage” “sicknesses” are now commonplace. Basically, there is an element of the population that no longer believe in acting like civilized human beings.

Thankfully, there are very few arseholes in my life. Yeah, I’ve met some real tosspots in my time, but they don’t tend to hang around long if you refuse to nourish their ego by validating their unnecessarily angry actions and attitudes.

The whole mentality surrounding the labelling of “Road Rage“, “Air Rage” and “God-Knows-What-Else Rage” as afflictions serves only to further validate these people’s behaviour and give them permission to continue to be an arsehole.

It’s time that we stopped “protecting” the arseholes in our midst and started kicking them into some kind of shape. They will not try to be civil until someone tells them that they are offensive to the entire concept of society. And if they refuse to comply … well, we can always make it look like suicide …

Posted in General Misery, People Skills

Yes, it’s that time again!

There is a whole collection of bad grammar occurrences that I see on a daily basis. Individually, I don’t suppose any of them is annoying enough to warrant a rant. But when you consider them as a whole, or indeed as a list, there is definitely reason to vent.

“Fewer”

If pressed for a figure, I think I would guess that 40% of the population of the UK know when to use the word “fewer” rather than “less“. The biggest culprit in this example is supermarkets with their “9 Items Or Less” signs all over the checkouts, but citing someone else’s mistake is NOT a way of excusing yourself. I don’t find it surprising that the employees that get the signs made for these supermarkets have a rather loose grasp on the English language. Surely, had they been privy to a level of eductaion higher than year 6, they would have a better job! What astounds me is that so FEW people recognize it as an error.

The concept is not difficult to grasp:

“Less” should be used when referring to something that either has no plural or cannot be counted.

ie. Money, Time, Water, Velcro

“Fewer” should be used when referring to things that do have plurals or can be counted.

ie. Items, Apples, Children, Sheep

Using “Less” in place of “Fewer” might not sound as bad as using “Fewer” in place of “Less“, but the error is exactly the same and is extremely easy to avoid.

OK, next is the incorrect placement of the apostrophe. Again, a very simple thing that is done wrong ALL THE TIME. The apostrophe has two functions. It either serves as a replacement of letters removed when using a contraction …

eg. “Do not” becomes “Don’t”. The apostrophe takes the place of the removed “o”.

Or it denotes posession.

eg. “That supermarket’s sign is gramatically incorrect.” The apostrophe tells us that the sign belongs to the supermarket.

Now, if the apostrophe is excluded, posession is no longer implied and the added “s” makes the word a plural and the sentence no longer makes sense gramatically. However, the main cause of annoyance is the use of the apostrophe when it is NOT required.

eg. Apple’s 50p per pound.

… and I use a grocer’s error as my example for a good reason. This improper use of the apostrophe is actually known as “The Greengrocers’ Apostrophe” as it seems that they knowingly use it incorrectly on a widespread basis. I don’t really care what their excuse may be. For me, it is sheer bloody-mindedness coupled with the desire to annoy as many people as they can on a daily basis.

“Apple’s” is bad enough, but the one that really gets on my nerves is on signs for potatoes. The word is clearly ready for any and all situations you can throw at it! It even has an extra “e” before the “s” that makes the potato plural that makes it completely obvious that this IS the plural form of the word and requires no further adjustments.

But the idiot grocer has to have his way and make it “potato’s” or even worse, “potatoe’s”! It is this widespread idiocy that is central to my rants about grammar!

I’m not a grammar Nazi – I don’t listen for the smallest errors in people’s speach and mock them or chastize them whenever possible. But constant repetition of the same errors … and the subsequent acceptance of those errors into “accepted” language really does irritate me. These grammatical rules – especially in the example of the apostrophe – are there to make the language easier to use. Corruption and blatant ignorance of these rules will only ever serve to increase the confusion.

More and more often, I seem to notice errors in spelling and grammar in what are supposed to be official letters and emails from banks, websites, shops … and there’s one Nigerian general whose grammar is ALL OVER THE PLACE. Although, to be fair, he IS Nigerian, so I’ll let him off.

The tautology is another pet hate of mine. The use of expressions that contain redundant repetition of words or meanings. For example, many people refer to their 4 digit identifier when using their debit card as their “PIN Number” …

The “N” stands for “Number“! Don’t say “Number” as well. You sound like an IDIOT!

I suppose you’re off to the ATM Machine to use your PIN Number so you can go and buy a DVD Disk. People that use these acronyms are said to be suffering from “RAS Syndrome“. That is, “Redundant Acronym Syndrome … Syndrome” and unfortunately, there is no cure.

The most common example of a tautology concerning repetition of meaning rather than of word is probably “Free gift” – Um, when is a GIFT NOT free? It’s a GIFT or it’s a FREE ITEM. Again, it seems that the supermarket is putting in the effort in order to contribute to the lowering of the general public’s IQ.

Finally on this subject, a quick word on marriage proposals.

The phrase you’re groping for … um … for which you are groping … is “Will you marry me?”

NOT “WOULD you marry me?”

“Would” is the conditional tense of the verb in question. Asking if a person WOULD marry you is like asking whether they would give up a kidney if asked!

“Well, yeah! Why not! … But you’re not ACTUALLY asking, right??!”

If I were ever confronted with this question, I would be obliged to answer in the following manner:

“Would you marry me?”

“Why yes, I would! … If you had enough of a grasp on the English language to pass for human in public, but clearly you don’t. Now, get the fuck out of my face, you repulsive simpleton.”

Posted in General Misery, People Skills