Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Life is good ... so let's complain

Not big complaints, just little complaints. Things that have been rubbing me the wrong way.

I'm hoping to release them into the ... um... universe (web?) and move on with my life, with the goal of not fretting over them (as much) from now on.

  1. Messages notifying you of messages that take as much space as the message itself. For example, my cell phone informs me that I missed a call with a little popup window that says "1 missed call" and a bunch of whitespace. They could have just as easily displayed the phone number.
  2. Daylight savings time: This has totally thrown Simone's sleep schedule for a loop, and it's not cool.
  3. People who don't push their chair in after getting up from a table. This seems to be common to most engineers at both places I've worked.
  4. People who don't close their locker after using it in the locker room.
  5. People who don't wash their hands after going potty. If you ever go to Intel, be sure to wash your hands after shaking hands with any men, because I never saw more than half the men wash their hands before leaving the restroom. At Mentor, half the people use the paper towel to open the door, and the other half just used the paper towel to dry their hands (almost everyone washes their hands).
  6. TV/Radio folks who say "backslash" at the end of their URL. It's not a backslash, it's a forward slash, commonly referred to as just slash.
  7. Programmers who can't touch type. Seriously, if you were a professional newspaper boy and needed training wheels, you'd be laughed at. What about a professional baseball player who has to use a tee? A competitive bowler who uses lane bumpers? A dancer who can't walk to a beat? An architect who can't use a straight edge? A singer who uses Auto-Tune? (oh, they're doing that).
  8. That anyone gives James O'Keefe a second of their time.
  9. Externalized costs (the environment is constantly picking up the tab).
  10. Oregon's law preventing you from pumping your own gas.
Those all seem pretty petty, eh? That's because life is good, I really can't complain. A list of things I'm grateful for is much longer, perhaps another time...

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