UnleashYourAnger.com

Picture this. You wait for the elevator, the door opens, you walk in, choose a corner and begin to walk towards it.  As the door closes behind you, you try to avoid eye contact with other passengers, and quickly try to reach for the buttons to select your floor.  Just as any good courteous person would do; you don't want to cause any delay.

...then, suddenly your hand touches the cold smooth steel of the elevator wall.  "What's going on?", you think to yourself, "I've been taking elevators my whole life.  How can I screw up so bad?" You look across the cabin, and there they are; the buttons.  As far away as they can be. 

To recoup some decency, you try to do the "I knew this was the wrong side" neck nod, then take a step towards the control panel, then you see a girl guarding it with her face buried in the corner.  Then you stumble.  With your arm mid-air, you hesitate, then she starts to utter some words, and sees your hand.  Then her hand goes up, but she doesn't know your intended destination...then the silence is covered up by the motor of the unguided elevator.  Pure awkwardness between you, the girl, and lifeless box ensues.

Right, the switches are ALWAYS on the wrong side. There is no rhyme or reason. There can be two elevators next to each other, but they can still be different.  Is this some kind of a cruel joke?

We all don’t like people who write ALL CAPS. Luckily, internet
”netiquette” has spread wide enough that we don’t see these folks so often.  However, I would like to rant about the CAPS haters.  I am talking about people who are so insecure and sensitive about CAPS that they feel people are YELLING and SHOUTING at them whenever they see it.

The other day at work, there was an email thread about discussing the next meeting date.  There were some back-and-forth and some mistaken labeling of the days (i.e. someone saying 2/27 was Tuesday, rather than Wednesday).  There was finally a day we could all agree on, so I wrote back, “OK, we will have the meeting on THURSDAY at 2:30PM.” 

Then, one of the recipients writes back, “WHICH THURSDAY DID YOU WANT TO HAVE THE MEETING??  We all read English, there is no need for the caps.”  Upon approaching him and inquiring, he replies, “You did offend me with your caps.  I don't think it was necessary to SCREAM the date.”

First of all, this has nothing to do with being able to read English. Secondly, isn’t it obvious that the caps in this case was meant for clarification instead of screaming?  Some people are just too damn sensitive about netiquette these days, they take things way too literally.  I know it is hard to pickup insinuation from emails and these rules help, but this is getting ridiculous.  In fact, isn’t using the caps the grammatically correct way to add emphasis?

A week later, I saw this same dude in middle of a busy street pounding, with a golf club, the heck out of a store sign.  The sign read, “BURGER KING - DRIVE THRU”.   It’s a crazy world out there.  Be good, everyone.

When I'm at work: I hate it when someone forwards me a huge email thread with 10 or 15 previous emails arguing back and forth between 5 different groups, and simply says "Hey can you help out here?" or something. Forcing me to read the entire thing from the bottom up and figure out what the hell is going on with it.  I'm not an email reading machine and frankly I have better things to do.

Instead, how about you give me a quick 2 sentence summary of what the problem is and how you think I might be able to help?  Your 1 minute spent doing that would save me 10 or 15 minutes of reading and figuring out.  I might not even be able to help, so then it's just a big waste of time for everybody involved.

In the old days before email this is how things would get done: you'd phone me, or visit my office, and explain the problem to me, and I'd probably be able to instantly offer a solution.  Nowadays half the people I work with are too lazy to do this and so they just shove the problem along to the next guy.  Where's the professionalism?

Why, please someone tell me, do businesses, retail establishments and the like insist on only unlocking one door of a double door entry/exit?!?  This is the fabulous US of A.  We walk and drive on the right.  Few things annoy me like walking along with friends or colleagues toward an exit, putting my hand out to push open the right door of a double door and being stopped in my tracks!  Is it that hard to unlock both?  Technically it's a fire violation to keep one side locked.  What gives?!  Not only are buildings legally responsible for opening both doors, it make sense for their patrons.  If a group of people is coming in while I'm exiting, I want to be able to proceed past them through my own side, not wait awkwardly for them to get through the door ("you go", "no, you go", "no, I insist") so I can leave. 

And I won't even start on the people who wait for the opposite door before going even though there is a second, UNLOCKED door available (just push, people). 

I don't mind when people leave out leftover food in the break room for the world to take at work, but there are some things that need to be left off-limits. 

Cold cut sandwiches don't make the cut.  I'm sorry.  But they stink up the room, no one knows exactly how long they've been there, and I'm left with a sick feeling in my stomach just thinking of the botulism crawling around on that plate every time I go in there for a coffee.  

Pasta salad takes on a life of it's own once it's been left out for a couple hours.  Let's avoid that one.

Regular green-type salad is borderline.  I guess it's ok, although once its been out for half an hour it's warm and nasty.  And if it's pre-dressed, forget about it.  Unless your dressing is 100-proof, that thing is just asking for a bacterial party.

Pizza is acceptable.  Any sort of dessert, pie, cake, whatever, bring it on.  Cookies, hells ya.  hmm, let me reiterate that one: COOKIES, HELLS YA!!!  

Oh, and another thing: if you're gonna leave something like that in there, at least do your duty and remove it after it's been out for an afternoon!  DON'T just go home and forget about it.  SOMEONE has to clean up your mess (yes, after 6 hours on the countertop, it's officially a "mess") later.  I sure as heck ain't gonna do it.

I know it seems that I rant about poop quite a bit, but it's a real cause of issues for me.  Today's poop rant is about Stall Etiquette.

At my office bathroom, there are three stalls.  Why, why, WHY, when I'm sitting in the farthest one to the left, does someone inevitably choose to use the middle one, when the one on the right is completely free?!?!  I'm sitting there taking my sweet time, enjoying a good poop, and inevitably some jackass rushes in to the middle stall and proceeds to explode all over the place in an apocalyptic frenzy.  And they are always in a real rush for some reason.  Half the time I'm not sure if their asses even touch the toilet seat.  Where are your manners?  Are you just trying to show off?

Not to dwell on this, but let's put things in perspective with a little math here.  The stall is about 3 feet wide.  My head is probably about 2 feet above the seat of the toilet.  If we apply the Pythagorean theorem we can figure out the distance from my face to the guy next to me's ass.  We'll call it the ass-face constant:

3 squared + 2 squared = assface constant squared 

assface = square root of 13, or about 3.6 feet. 

This means that my face is barely three and a half feet from your ass while you are carpet bombing the toilet.  And we all know that the stall walls don't do jack to stop anything from coming under the wall and into my space.  There are noxious fumes coming out of your ass, and I have no choice but to inhale them.  Forget about politeness and etiquette, this is a serious public health issue.

Look, I can understand if the rightmost stall is occupied and you've got a serious case of Taco Bell's Revenge going on but under any other circumstances, that middle stall is to remain UNOCCUPIED.

Why does my computer have to tell me this with that huge annoying bubble in the lower right-hand corner every time it loses my wireless network and reconnects again??

I feel like I need to praise my computer when it does that.  Why, thanks, little fella'!!!  Keep up the great work!!  You're doin' just dandy!!!

It's like the 5 year old who goes to town on his construction paper with a box of crayons and then brings it home to show Mommy, so proud, so hoping that she'll find it worthy of the refrigerator door... 

Most people would know better than to ask.  I think you learn it pretty early on in life - never ask a woman if she's pregnant.  That lesson apparently escaped my assistant.  I took a sick day from work, legitimately staying home with what would turn out to be the worst cold I've had in years.  I was working from my couch, however, and emailing back and forth with my assistant.  Suddenly, out of nowhere she emails "are u pregnant?"  For starters, let me preface this rant with the fact that I was not offended (truth be told, I really am pregnant though, at the time, I hadn't even told my family because it was so early on).  What astounded me and pisses me off is that she felt totally justified in asking!  Let's review the plethora of reasons why you don't ask this question:

--maybe I'm pregnant/maybe I'm not
--maybe I'm keeping it/maybe I'm not
--maybe it's my husband's/boyfriend's/maybe it's not
--maybe I've been trying and am not having luck
--maybe I just lost the baby
--maybe I'm barren and will never have children

 When I pointed out to her that it was an inappropriate question, she was basically like "I was just ready to congratulate you if you were."  Like it was no big deal because she had good intentions.  Let this be known to all who wonder about a co-worker - you are not allowed to ask regardless of your suspicions.  She will tell you when she's darn good and ready (usually waiting until she absolutely can't hide it from her employer anymore) and she sure as hell will not make her big announcement over the office email!!!  So keep your suspicions to yourself and your big mouth shut.