The "Shit That Pisses Me Off" Series

Shit That Pisses Me Off

• Double standards
  "A rule or principle applied more strictly to some people more than others (or oneself)." -OED
  Do I even need to explain this one? Even though they often attempt to eliminate discrimination, double standards are inherently discriminatory.
• Stupid People
  I hate them and hope that they kill themselves off. "Hey, let's throw ice at cars." "Hey, let's try and jump off the roof and on to the tree." "Hey, let's feed the dog a Hershey's." And when something bad happens, it's "not their fault" because "they didn't know better." WRONG! It is their fault. Stupidity is not an excuse. If it's not their fault, then they didn't do it. If they didn't do it, then who did? Exactly. They did it, and they are accountable for their actions, regardless of their intelligence.
• People Who Don't Mean What They Say
  This overlaps with the former item. If you want something for [holiday], don't say you want nothing for [holiday], because that's what you'll get. I'm not telepathic.
• Reality Television
  Reality shows are not reality. In reality, people do not organize themselves into tribes, stay on a deserted island, and compete for money, while having every second of it taped by a swarm of cameramen. In real life, people don't eat cockroaches and set their hair on fire to beat the guy eating goat testicles while playing hot potato with a bomb. These situations are arranged by television crews to get ratings and make money. It's not real at all. Even worse, it's stupid.
• The Paris Hilton Sex Tape
  Whoa, rich people have sex too? My world has been turned upside-down! Porn? On the internet? Shocking! All in all, who really cares? What is the big deal about it? The fact that people have sex is not news.
• Dr. Pepper
  It tastes horrible. Even when I need the caffeine and it's the only soda in the house, I can't bring myself to drink it. I don't know what they put in it to make it taste so bad. Possibly manure, or spoiled milk. Maybe cat vomit.
• "Ghetto" As An Adjective
  "Ghetto" is a noun, not an adjective. It means "A quarter of a city where Jews live in greatest numbers." It does not mean "cool", "rad", or "awesome". People who use "ghetto" as an adjective fall into the "stupid people" category.
• The New McDonald's Advertisements
  When I'm watching television, every five minutes a McDonald's ad comes on with annoying rap or string music, a semi-free-verse poem, and people engaging in various "hip" activities while eating McDonald's food, followed by a black screen with the McDonald's logo and below it, in white, "i'm lovin' it". IRC spelling and all. Of course they're "lovin' it". They probably got paid thousands of dollars to be in the ads. The biggest advertising budget in the world won't keep your food from tasting like garbage.
• The "-izzle" Suffix
  Shizzle. Nizzle. Fazizzle. Words that anger me to no end. Everyone is saying it, and yet nobody knows what it means. They just say it to hear themselves speak. I think it's a modern version of the "-uh" suffix, as in "buh" and "duh", commonly said by morons. It's a modern phrase for the modern jackass.
• That Jewelry Store
  I'm referring to the jewelry store where my mom is selling her ring and buying another one. I hate this place. The carpet is bright pink, the ceiling is covered in bright fluorescent lights, and there are disco balls and pieces of white fur hanging in the front window. It's visual hyperglycemia.
• People Who Talk To Me When I'm On The Phone
  Just because you can't see the person I'm talking to doesn't mean you're not interrupting our conversation. I can't talk and listen to two people simultaneously, and I can't hear the person on the phone as well as I can hear you. Don't do that.

Shit That Pisses Me Off: Part 2

• Yelling at people who can't hear you
  Today, Molly was calling her friends. As she was waiting for them to answer, she was whining, crying, even screaming for them to pick up the phone. How hard is it to understand that until they answer, THEY CAN'T HEAR YOU AND THEREFORE AREN'T GOING TO ANSWER NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU SCREAM AT THEM! Then, I'm in a car, and the driver is yelling at the other people in their cars. Once again, THEY CAN'T HEAR YOU AND THEREFORE WILL NOT RESPOND. This idea is not difficult to comprehend. Think before you scream.
• Noisy cars
  Where I live, these tend to fall into four categories. First, the stereos. These people drive past in the wee hours of the morning playing a bass track on their earth-shatteringly loud speakers. The house literally vibrates as they drive past. They do this over and over and over, and I am subjected to this against my will. I can't change the station or turn down the volume, all I can do is wait for it to be over. When I get a car, I'm going to shield its electrical components and then install some sort of device that can disable other cars' stereos. Second, the honkers. These people will lean on the horn for at least 10 seconds, leading us to believe that they've keeled over dead. Unfortunately, they're just dipshits. If you abuse the horn, it loses its meaning. Third, the squealers. These are the cars that go SCREEE-EEEEE-EEEECH vrooooooOOOOOOOOM. Over and over and over. Push the gas pedal down slooooowly. Although you may think it's a race, it is not. Fourth, the motorcycles. They make a horrible, gut-wrenching, brain-bending roar that leaves you in a state of utter shock and mental disarray. In the middle of the night. I don't know much about motorcycles, but I do know that it's damn inconsiderate.
• MSN display names
  This feature simply should not exist. It forces the receiver of MSN IMs to put forth unreasonable effort to find out who they're actually talking to, because their true identity is masked by a chosen string that they can change at will. This is unacceptable; people's identities should remain constant. It also leads to abuse of the feature. Changing your display name to MSN Messenger or .NET Service can help you convince people into giving you their passwords. Other people set their display names as lyrics, ASCII art, stupid quotes, and pretty much anything that has nothing to do with their identity. See for yourself. Some of them, such as jenz_lou87@hotmail.com, will change their display name very often and very rapidly. Changing their display name necessitates a signoff, leading to the annoying effect of the signoff and signon sounds being played every three seconds until the jackass that somehow weaseled their way on to your contact list decides what's going to show up in place of their name for the next 10 minutes at best. Trillian's sounds are pretty cool, but they get annoying when you have to listen to them a lot in a short period of time.
• AIM chat
  Something else that should not exist. Comparing AIM chat to IRC would be blasphemy. AIM chat has no operators, therefore there are no kicks or bans, and therefore annoying people and bots have free run of the room. In the hell that is "Rate a Buddy", at least 60% of the conversation consists of repeating advertisements. A significant portion of the remainder consists of ape-men asking "A/S/L" and the other ape-men answering. Even worse, much of it is in variably-sized fonts in bright colors on background colors that make it either barely legible or absolute torture to see. Some of the non-bots have names that make you ask, "Did they come up with this in the middle of an epileptic fit?" A sampling: Alkaholik187, AshlyHor4, BrAvEhEarT 649, Cr4zyH0rnyGirl, EstrangedStalker, PrettyGirl2Hug69, LipKisses7, pyro blader14, ReallyBigBMW, and sOuThErNpRiDe557. I swear I am not making this up. Furthermore, most of these people don't seem to have an adequate grasp of English, but that's to be expected, seeing as this is AOL. My point is that AIM chat is useless compared to IRC and should never be used, unless you enjoy the company of boneheads.

Instant Messenger Services Suck
Instant messenger services suck, and they really piss me off. Where shall I start? AOL Instant Messenger pops up ads on your screen when it starts up, and continues displaying them while you use it. Is this really free? Also, it hooks itself into Outlook Express, so whenever I want to check my e-mail, it starts up, signs me on, knocks me off Trillian and shoves ads in my face. What jackass came up with that? Maybe the same jackass that came up with the warning system. What gives you the right to keep someone from talking to their friends on an abysmal IM service? What gives them the right to keep you from doing so? And when you do get warned, all the dipshits on your contact list ask you "omfg hu warnd u ?????" Here's an interesting concept for you to consider: IT'S NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS, ASSHOLE. On top of that, AOL made a lame attempt to outdo IRC. AIM chat is about the worst thing ever, with such awful rooms as "Rate a Buddy", which actually involves no rating whatsoever, and "Checkout Lane", which has no actual purpose. There is no intelligent conversation in AIM chat. There is no power structure and you cannot be kicked out. It's all porn bots and idiots doing as they please. And another thing: the text itself.


Need I say more? If you're conversing via a textual medium, you could at least make it easy to read what you're saying. But no, these asshats have to look cool by making their text a pain to read. It's just as bad as straining to hear something.

MSN Messenger. Oh, how I loathe this program. Just like AIM, it launches with Outlook Express and knocks me off Trillian. This service has a whole new crop of enraging "features". Your identity is based on your e-mail address, so they allow you to change the name that's displayed to pretty much anything. Naturally, this leads to abuse of the feature, like names that wrap to four lines and contain foreign characters that get messed up. Also, people on MSN tend to use letters in parentheses in messages, in names, in everything. (L) this and (F) that. (N) here and (R) there. These proprietary icons are completely unnecessary. At least with emoticons you can tell what they mean without needing to translate them into little pictures. The official MSN Messenger has built-in games and webcam functions, which lead to such annoying messages as "RandomAsshole@shitmail.com has challenged you to a game of chess. You will need the latest blah blah blah download at http://blahblahblah.blah." They get confused and angry when I tell them I have Trillian. They shouldn't make assumptions. "SweetieMoron6969@turdfuck.net has invited you to view his or her webcam. You will need to blah blah download blah blah blah." What makes them think that I'm going to install some semi-infectious garbage on to my computer just to watch some stupid shitface playing the part on a low-quality cam? If I want to see people, I'll watch TV. Furthermore, they decided to make multiperson conversations possible. Big mistake. Now, anyone can invite his jackass friends into a conversation without the approval of the other person. There is no way to remove them from the conversation, unless they leave on their own. There is no list of who is in a certain conversation. And everyone's names show up as display names, so you might not even know who you're talking to. What an utter failure.

Although I have not detailed the shortcomings of ICQ and Yahoo, the two other main IM services, they all have something in common: most of the people using them are idiots. Now you might be thinking "Hey! I use IM services and I'm not an idiot!" Keep in mind, I only said most. As you may have gathered from reading other parts of my site, I do not like stupid people. The reason there are so many morons using IM services is because the creators of the IM services made them easy to use. You see, keeping things difficult will keep the stupid people away, or encourage them to educate themselves to an acceptable level. These simply, user-friendly programs throw all that away, allowing idiots to flood the network. But there is hope.

All these IM services can't hold a candle to IRC, the Internet Relay Chat protocol. Although primarily a chatroom system, it's also great for instant messaging if you don't care about stupid frills like buddy icons, crazy text, and webcams. Plus, IRC itself will never go down, unlike IM services' "maintenance outages" and the like. Although a server or network may go down, there are always more servers and networks out there. Plus, IRC is a tad more difficult to use, so there are less stupid people, except on DALnet, but I wouldn't recommend going there. There's a notify function for telling you when someone has logged on, if you're too lazy to look in the right panel list. And the chatrooms actually have power structures that facilitate order, unlike AIM chat and MSN multiperson conversations. And most networks have services for permanently registering a name to yourself so nobody else can pretend to be you. As a matter of fact, I'm considering abandoning my current IM identities in favor of simply staying on IRC on one network as one identity. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. We'll see.