IRRITATIONS

You know what really annoys me?  People who decide public transport is the perfect location to go through their selection of ring tones on their mobile phone regardless of how irritating it is to their fellow passengers.

This is what happened to me on the bus this morning and I almost, almost said something. 

But what if the offender doesn’t quite hear me and I have to repeat myself which makes me miss my stop, or I use my hands to gesture at his phone, the bus lurches and I land in an embarrassed heap at his feet, or he attacks me for protesting in the first place which sets the whole bus off in a discourse about the boundaries of the public’s interference in each other’s lives. 

And all of that just seemed like too much to deal with at 11am on a Monday morning, so I got off the bus and let the warm autumn sun burn the irritation out of me.

There are quite a few things that annoy me (as surprising as that may seem) and I think I’ll share them with you right here and now.

Another public transport misdemeanor (I am a huge advocate of PT when it works and is on time, which is generally never in the state of New South Wales) is people who clip their fingernails and let their discarded droppings tumble to the floor like seagull poo from the sky.  To be fair, this was a regular occurrence on the New York subway and I’m thankfully yet to see it in my homeland.

Automated voices when you call customer service are also up there, but who doesn’t get annoyed by that? 

My husband’s work hours irritate.  As do pantyhose, though I’ve managed to construct a life where (unless I’m performing) they are an unnecessary fashion accessory.  Dentists are annoying, mostly because they yell at you for not flossing enough and you can’t retort because they’ve shoved a hard, cold metal tool into the back of your throat. 

I find photocopiers intensely annoying, (they see me coming and deliberately malfunction, doing extra copies or not enough, skipping pages and printing upside down) which is perhaps one reason I have never pursued a job in an office. 

An order of stale banana bread at a café when you decided not to go with the raisin toast, L platers on freeways (I appreciate RTA trying to give our young drivers a taste of life in the fast lane, but it is annoying none the less) and bikini waxes in Australia that provide forty minutes of pain in my life instead of the swift seven it takes in New York.

People who walk on the wrong side of the footpath and fail to move even though they see you from at least a hundred yards and you’re clearly running dead for them also elevate my blood pressure.  It’s not that I mind moving for them, but when I do, I then come face to face with a serious, much faster runner (usually a bloke twice my size) or worse, a kamikaze bike rider trying to break the national record for the city to inner west commute.  And so, because some nitwit chatting on her iPhone refuses to take one step to her right, I have to break suddenly to avoid hitting her, she doesn’t apologise and I am annoyed.

This happened yet again on my run today and I really wish I could see a way to stop it happening.  But I fear that for every person I scold, there will be one to tell me to quit my whinging, one to tell me it’s a free country, and another to tell me to run around an oval instead and then I wouldn’t face the problem in the first place. 

And for all my bravado and big talk in this blog, I really would rather avoid confrontation if you don’t mind.

Maybe tomorrow I should go to yoga.  No one would dare invade my space there.  That is against the yoga protocol, which means (providing I don’t get annoyed by the exercise itself) I could then pass the day in relative harmony.