List Day: Top Five Pet Peeves of the Moment

It's been over 9 years since I last talked about the things that annoy me!

1. Recipe Stories: Every recipe on the Internet now opens with a 6 page testimonial to the efficacy of the ingredients and the reasons why the cook likes smoothies. I understand that this has to be done because Google penalizes bare-bones recipe pages as "lacking original content" but it doesn't make it any less obnoxious. At the very least, give me a link at the top that says "click here to skip the BBC miniseries about how I invented this recipe in my meditation room".


2. Subreddit Devolution: I've lurked on Reddit for over 4 years now, mainly to read other peoples' responses to threads full of creepy stories or unique experiences. It annoys me when areas of this site (called subreddits) pertain to something I'm actually interested in reading about but have devolved into a bunch of teenagers posting low effort memes only tangentially related to the topic. I visit /r/GrimDawn to discover interesting strategies for playing Grim Dawn, not wade through 800 animated GIFs showing "my reaction when" something inane happens in the game. The only thing worse than a poorly moderated subreddit full of memes is one full of fan art. NO ONE CARES THAT YOU DREW HARRY POTTER ON A NAPKIN.


3. Safeway Sales: Our local Safeway is effectively demonstrating the laws of entropy by rapidly out-Bottom-Dollaring Bottom Dollar. The salmon is always expired, the produce may have been stolen from last month's farmer's market, and the sale tags are consistently outdated. There is only a 26% chance that that "Buy One Get One Free" tag will actually register correctly at checkout, so trying to save money there is the most dangerous game. As you skim your incorrect receipt on the way to the door, you have to weigh the value of the $3 you lost to the 15 minutes it will take for anyone to actually come to the customer service desk to help you.


4. Early Morning Commuting: I commute down the 2-lane portion of Route 7 to Tysons, a route made bearable by the fact that I leave at 5 AM and only do it a couple times per week. For the most part, it's actually somewhat pleasant because every single person on the road is committed to getting to DC as quickly as possible. You can feel the teamwork and solidarity as a massive caravan of paper pushers accelerates off the red light to a steady 70 in unison. Of course, this rolling wave of efficient travel usually bottlenecks behind the only 2 people on the road without somewhere important to be driving 50 miles per hour. Although my methodology is not scientific, I can state with 100% confidence that one of the people will be driving a rusted pickup truck with West Virginia tags, and the other will be a hypermiling Prius (silver or white only).


5. Gas Station Kiosks: Pumping gas has a 10 second overhead from all of the questions you have to answer about unwanted car washes and rewards card memberships. Although the endless loops of Jimmy Kimmel clips and Progressive ads no longer bother me (pro tip: hit all of the buttons on the right side of the screen and you will find one that mutes the kiosk), gassing up is still not a pleasant experience. I never have a chance to clean the bird crap off my windows because there's never a working squeegee and the squeegee water always smells like a bird died in it.

What's annoying you today?