As I was chatting about this with Zoe while I was looking over my list of prompts, I think I figured out a theme with things that drive me crazy: inefficiency/unnecessary slowness.
There is some slowness that I understand; children do a lot of things slowly as they are learning, and that doesn’t drive me crazy.
What bugs me is when it seems obvious that something could be done faster/more efficiently, but it’s d r a g g i n g.
For instance:
- a class that’s going too slowly
- a meeting that didn’t need to be this long and drawn-out
- when someone verbally goes over information that I could have just read on my own
- a decision that is being analyzed to death
- someone telling me a story with zillions of unnecessary details
- someone telling me the plot of a movie/show with a bunch of details (SUMMARIZE PLEASE)
- a long wait at an office/store due to human slowness
- a book or movie that never really gets going (I’ve seen some indie movies like this and I felt annoyed.)
- a YouTube video where someone talks for a long time before actually getting to the helpful part of the video (repair tutorials are notorious for this!)
The upside of this part of me is that I am pretty speedy and efficient; I can get a lot done in a short period of time.
But the downside is that I can struggle to be cheerful about it when someone else is making something go slowly.
My husband tells me the story of an ENTIRE movie with ALL the details and it drives me nuts! But. I have come to realize that telling stories is his love language, so I try to pause what I am doing and follow along because it makes him happy. That said, everything that you listed drives me nuts as well, so I completely understand!
I knowww! Ugh. I know that I should have a good and gracious attitude about it because it obviously is serving the person who is telling me all the details, but oh man, I s t r u g g l e.
I hear you on this. There are so many podcasts that last forever because it is felt that they must be a certain length.
What Drives Me Crazy?
Modern day consumerism. The sheer amount of stuff that people feel compelled to purchase. The more you have the less you value each item. The waste of the production, disposal, etc. Recently is has come to light that so many items that are returned (especially items returned via “mail”) are simply dumped.
I am SO with you on this – unnecessary slowness. This year, husband and I have had several surgeries (none life threatening) and found that being involved with the medical community grinds life down to a snail’s pace – waiting, waiting, waiting.
1. People who are late (at my father’s funeral, one of his employees said my father thought people were late if they were not five minutes early. My husband turned to me and said, “Now I know where you got that!”)
2. People who tell you, in intimate and laborious detail, about people you have never met and never intend to meet. (And sometimes even want to show you pictures of these people!)
3. People who cannot say no and then later complain about something they “had” to do because they did not just say no.
I just got home from work, so I think this list would be too long. 🙂 When I was younger, though, it used to drive me crazy when I would be driving, listening to a tape (yup, I’m of the age of cassette tapes in cars), and I would be getting to my destination, but I would have to turn the car off in the middle of a song. I would stop the tape early so when I got back in the car, it would be at the beginning of a song.
Now I don’t listen to music in the car. One reason is because there’s no radio reception here and my CD player is broken. But the main reason is that I now have the constant, melodic (ahem) voices of my children talking, fighting, and generally making too much competing noise for listening to music to be enjoyable.
In these weird days, what drives me crazy is the one-way aisles at the grocery stores. Two of the three stores I shop at have them. It’s not the signs or directions that drive me crazy. I can appreciate the goal with them, I like organization, and my mind kind of enjoys the little mental game of remembering which aisle goes which way and figuring out what order I need to get things in. What drives me nuts is that it feels like over 50% of people shopping go THE WRONG WAY. They don’t care. I’m sure the store employees don’t really care. But every time there’s a person walking the wrong way and coming towards me (or I have to stop and wait because there are so many people going the wrong way that I can’t get through) I struggle. “Why is it so hard to follow a sign? Why can’t you respect the rules? It’s not a big deal… just do it.” I know that my rule-follower self is overreacting and I’m working to let it go. But I can’t wait until all the signs are gone. Then it won’t really bother me if people go against the natural flow of the aisles at Aldi.
When people are pretending to just chat to me ahead of a sales pitch. Whether it’s in person (think old acquaintance who looks you up because they’re in an MLM and want to sign you up), or written (some blogs are this way: it seems like a regular blog post but it’s all a lead-up to buying/signing up for/joining something.). So annoying! It actually makes me less likely to buy/sign up for the thing.
I totally get that. Which is why when I do a post promoting a product or an offer, I usually find myself just announcing that right at the beginning; that way you know what you’re getting.