As you may know, I was on vacation last week. It was fabulous and relaxing and blah blah blah...
Sorry, folks, but even the best of vacations aren't quite perfect. And that, my friends, is my great talent in life. I don't see it as complaining, I'm pointing out opportunities for improvement! At this, I excel.
Now before you go on thinking how miserable and ungrateful I am, know that my first post-vacay post was all, "this is so awesome." So at least I'm not always miserable. I've got that going for me. Anyway...
Here are the top five things that annoyed the crap out of me on my nearly perfect vacation.
5. Poorly executed commercials. While wasting time channel surfing, I saw a commercial for farmersonly.com. It's a dating site for farmers and other rural folks. In it, some talking cows are discussing a poor, single girl who's taking a walk through the cornfield alone again. (Hey, cows. You should stop feeling bad for the single girl. I've got a feeling her future is brighter than yours.) Meanwhile, the screen shows a girl walking through what I'm pretty sure is a wheat field. I don't know for sure, I don't walk through many wheat fields. But I am from Illinois, so I do know a cornfield when I see one. And that was no cornfield. I felt bad for the rural Americans looking for love. If the farmersonly.com folks can't even identify the type of grain the girl is walkin through, I don't have high hopes for their ability to make a rural love connection.
4. App designers not usability testing their work. I had some issues with the Twitter app this past week. You may have heard about that one already though.
3. Noise. You see, when you're trying to unplug and relax, you realize just how damn noisy people can be. Lawnmowers, hammers, garbage trucks, screaming children, iPhones left in neighboring hotel rooms with alarms going off that NEVER TURN OFF for HOURS! Seriously, people, I'm trying to take a 3 pm nap over here. Next vacation I'm heading to Montana. I hear it's quiet there.
2. People who don't realize the difference between being polite and folksy and being rude and condescending. Case in point, when the 50-something TSA agent calls the 80-something woman he's screening "young lady." Dude! Knock that shit off. 80-something is not young unless she's a Redwood, so you're not being cute, you're being patronizing. Cut it out. If you pull that crap with me when I'm 80, I'm going to smack you upside the head with my cane.
1. The baggage claim area. God how I hate the baggage claim area. It could work so nicely. But NOOOOO. Some of you jerks need to stand as close to the belt as is physically possible. Can't stand 2 feet back so that everyone else can see their bags as well. Nope, YOU need to stake out your own personal section of the belt. YOU need to make sure that when your bag arrives, not a second of your precious time is lost due to things like "common courtesy" and "human decency." And once one person steps up, everyone else has to step up, too. Partly because you can no longer see the bags coming because of the jerk standing right next to the belt blocking your view, but also because now everyone is standing next to the belt so if you don't get up there, too, there won't be space for you. And then when you see your bag and try to politely say, "excuse me," people look at you like, "you can't fit in here! Go find your own section of the belt!" I'm here to tell you, you're all freakin' idiots. Back the frock up. If y'all would each take two steps back, there'd be room for everyone and everyone would be able to see all the bags. On this trip, not only did a jerk decide to park himself directly in front me (like literally stood with his back 8 inches in from my nose when there was about 5 feet of open space just 3 feet to my right), he decided to build a 9 suitcase wall in between me and the belt. He's damn lucky my suitcase didn't come before his wife came and whisked their suitcases away or I would have climbed over his suitcase mountain to get through to get my bag. Jerk.
But like I said... Other than that, it was perfect.
(God, aren't you glad you're not my husband.)
