What Really Gets On Your / My Nerves?

There are certain things in day to day life that really bug me and make me want to go ARRRRRGGGGHHHH! This Hub is my chance to get these things off my chest and to see if these same things bug everyone else as much as they do me.

1) 'BABY ON BOARD' signs in the back of cars. I mean what do they want, a medal or something? Perhaps an announcement on local radio congratulating them on the fact they are transporting a baby in their vehicle. Alternatively, is it their way of saying, 'Please allow me to drive like a total idiot and do your best not to crash into me as I do have a baby on board after all'. This really annoys me, as I would assume we would all try to do our best to drive safely whether there is a baby on board the vehicle in front or not. I mean, do you look for cars without this sign in the rear window, and then think, 'Oh good, I can now crawl up this persons backside with my car or dangerously overtake them because at least they don't have a baby on board'!!!

2) Doctor's Waiting Rooms, I mean, c'mon, they are full of sick people. If you go in to see your Doctor with a pulled muscle, you come out with every germ known to man, and will no doubt end up with raging flu, various rashes and diarrhoea to boot. Surely it would be better if they lumped all the people with nasty contagious type ailments into one set of bookings late in the afternoon, and let the people with the non-contagious type problems all come in the morning before the waiting room has morphed into an outsized petrie dish of bacteria just looking for a new host.

3) Elderly People who will insist on continuing to drive their cars, even though there is not a cat in hell's chance they could pass a test if they took one today. Few things are more frustrating than being stuck behind some old Granny who can barely see over her steering wheel and never drives above 20 mph no matter what the actual speed limit is. I swear they cause more accidents than the fast drivers, as most people take far greater risks to overtake them simply because they are so frustrated at being stuck behind them.

4) Dog Owners who simply refuse to pick up after their pets, leaving us poor unsuspecting sods to step in the 'doo doo' at a later time. I mean how hard can it be to carry a few poo bags with you, and then pick up as you go along for disposal later? When I was living in Tenerife it was a regular assault course to walk down the local pavements, as no-one seemed to pick up after their dogs, and simply left it for the rest of the population to dodge their way around as best they could, not easy at 11.00 pm on a dark night believe me!

5) Parents who still treat their adult children as if they had never grown up. My Mother still tells me off if I let slip that I was up writing a Hub article until 3.00 am. I am 38 years old for goodness sake. I still get my eight hours sleep in afterwards, so what is the problem exactly! If I choose to have more than two glasses of wine she starts reminding me that I 'only have a small frame', and tells me it will damage my health, WTF, I have about six glasses when I am at home on my own and I am still here and pretty healthy all things considered.

6) Husbands who try to get major 'Brownie Points' with the inlaws at their wives expense, e.g. My Husband saying to my Mum and Step Dad, 'No more wine for Cindy she has to drive', after I have only had a small glassful, yet in the past this same Husband had no problem with me driving both of us home from the pub after I had drunk three or four glasses of wine.

7) Mothers with those huge double buggies for their children. Not only do these buggies hog the whole aisle in the supermarket, but they seem to be oblivious to the frustration they are causing to other shoppers. I don't mind the ones where the two kiddies are seated one in front of the other so much, but the ones where they are seated side by side should be illegal by now.

8) Mothers who use their child's buggy or pram as a means of crossing the road, i.e. Emerge from behind parked vehicle, shove buggy in front of oncoming traffic, resulting in major squealing of brakes as all the cars do their damnedest to stop before annihilating the child seated in the buggy or pram in front of them. End result, pile ups of cars, with Mother crossing the road complete with baby, apparently unaware of the chaos she has caused.

9) Mothers again, (I know sorry!). This time it is the mothers who have their children in buggies waiting on the bus stop. They know their bus is due any minute, perhaps they can even see it in the distance, but they still don't even begin to collapse their buggy down until the bus is right on the stop itself. As an ex-bus driver myself I can categorically say this was infuriating and only compounded the problems of buses being late. Having to sit there for a further few minutes whilst they struggled like mad to collapse the buggy that they must have collapsed a thousand times before. If they knew it was going to be that hard why didn't they start to collapse it ten minutes ago when they arrived at the bus stop in the first place!

10) Parents who allow their children to run amok in supermarkets or restaurants without making any effort to control them. It drives me mad to be forced to listen to screaming children in a public place, usually charging round chasing each other. This is doubly annoying in restaurants where you are trying to have a quiet meal, and are paying for the privilege. My Mother went into a shop the other day and found three or four kids playing football in the drinks aisle, surrounded by breakable glass bottles, and not a parent in sight. Even the staff weren't doing anything about it until Mum complained as to how dangerous it was. I would have been soundly spanked on my bare bottom in public and in front of everyone if I had behaved this way as a child, and it never did me any harm at all on the couple of occasions it happened, I was more embarrassed than anything else.

11) Woman Drivers, (yes I know I am one). The problem is not with all women drivers, but simply the ones who give the rest of us women a bad name. Time and again I have watched in frustration as they try to reverse park a car. I get to the stage I am itching to get out of my own vehicle and offer to park it for them. Were they never taught how to use wing mirrors, or are they simply using them to apply makeup, whilst the gearstick doubles as some kind of handbag holder. The really lazy ones don't even attempt the reverse park, and always opt to drive forward into even the smallest space, even though they can't possibly park the car properly that way, so end up leaving it a metre or more away from the kerb, and often at all kinds of weird angles, then they simply abandon it and go shopping!

12) Cyclists, namely the ones who insist on riding two abreast instead of one behind the other, making it virtually impossible to overtake them, especially when they are usually wobbling all over the place.

17) Shop Assistants who go to the opposite extreme of the above and go out of their way to be as miserable and unhelpful as possible, no matter how hard you try to get a smile out of them. You would think this would mainly apply to kids or students only doing it as a part-time job, but this isn't necessarily true either, and I have encountered this attitude with many middle aged or older shop assistants too. I really object to my going out of my way to be pleasant and polite, and all I am getting in return is a sullen, disinterested face with zero personality and no manners. It doesn't cost anything to smile, and as for the employers, for God's sake pay a higher wage and get a better quality of staff, the extra wages will be more than covered by the repeat business you get from contented and happy customers.

18) Junk Mail, a major pet hate of mine is when you open the newspaper or a magazine and half a tree falls out, or more accurately the equivalent in junk leaflets and brochures for things you are never going to buy or want. If you are anything like me I simply round up all of these leaflets and they go straight into the bin. When are these marketers going to work out that this is what happens to most of their leaflets, and that this is not a very efficient way of advertising or generating sales, especially if you consider the impact on the environment. The only people who seriously sit down and read all this cr*p, are little old folk with nothing better to do with all their time, and probably no money to spend on these products anyway. I don't want to enter a "Readers Digest" competition, as I know by simply entering I will be inundated with yet further junk mail. Nor do I believe I have won when those envelopes come through my door saying I am "a £100,000 Winner" all over the envelope and yet they have spelt my name wrong. I know that if I scratch off the free scratch card that landed on my mat I will have won something for certain, no matter how hard I hope for a losing one, and likewise I know if I phone up the number to claim my prize it will be a premium rate phoneline that will keep me on the phone long enough to more than cover the cost of the prize that I may or may not end up actually receiving. Do the marketers think we all escaped from the local mental hospital and that we can't work all of this out for ourselves?

19) Commercial Breaks, the issue I have with these is not only that they seem to have become almost as long as the programmes themselves, but the frequency of when they come on. Lately I have found that I can start watching a programme such as "Stargate Atlantis", which usually has a few minutes of the episode before the credits and the theme tune kicks in, then as soon as the intro music finishes, on comes an ad break. How does this seem fair to you? I have just watched an ad break before the programme started, then had three minutes of viewing the actual programme, 90 seconds of theme music, and now I have another five minutes of ad break to watch. To make matters worse they have started raising the volume of the adverts versus the programme you are watching, so every time the ads kick in you leap six foot in the air and grab the remote control to avoid being deafened. I am guessing this is Sky's idea of making you listen to the adverts properly, but they seem to have got it very wrong, as I am inclined to mute the TV completely now until the adverts have finished.

20) Staff Training Courses, In my time I have had the misfortune to have been forced to attend numerous staff training courses for different companies. Now no offence to my American friends, but it is very obvious that most of these courses were inspired by American influences. One of the worst things they inflict on their poor victims is, "Role Play". The words even make my blood curdle. If I wanted to be an actor I would have gone to drama school, not opted to sell electrical gadgets to members of the public. Nothing makes you feel like more of an idiot than having to stand in front of the rest of the class and pretend to be a shop assistant dealing with a difficult customer. In addition to this they teach you to seriously underestimate the public's intelligence by only asking "open" questions to avoid avoid the "No thank you, I am just looking" response. For example, you don't go up to the customer and say "Can I help you?", as this is a closed question and allows the customer to come back with the aforementioned response. No, instead you must ask, "How can I help you?", so they are forced to furnish you with details. How stupid do they think people are! I can spot this technique at 500 metres, and believe me, I am heading for the door. I want to be able to say "I am just looking", as that is exactly what I want to do, look! If I need help or have questions I shall track down an assistant and ask them.

Then they go on to teach you how to sell extended warranties that cost nearly as much as the product itself. This is a tall order by any means, and I hated the fact we were expected to praise up the logic behind taking out the extended warranty when I couldn't even see it myself. Then we had to try and sell home delivery of the goods for an extra £10. I have to admit I was so unimpressed by the course I was on one particular time, that when they asked me for an example of a product I could try to sell home delivery on, my answer was 'A toaster', which had the class in fits of laughter for about ten minutes afterwards.

Needless to say I no longer work in sales, it all became too much!

13) Cyclists again, this time the ones who ride around at night with no lights on and rely totally on everyone else to spot them in the dark and not squish them into the tarmac. It almost makes me want to bump into them deliberately, not enough to kill them of course, but enough that the Police would get called out and I could argue that I hadn't seen them because they had no lights on their bike. At least this way they would be the ones who got into trouble and might learn a lesson in personal safety.

14) Loud Car Stereos, I simply hate it when a car drives past me with all the windows open and the loud "Boom Boom Boom" of rubbish music assaulting my ears at full volume. Most of their back seat usually consists of speakers, with little hope of squeezing a passenger in as well, and inevitably the driver is some young lad of about 18, who has obviously spent more on the stereo than he did on the car. Apart from my finding it really odd that they need their music (if that's what it can be called), so loud in such a small space, I wonder how on earth they are meant to hear such things as Ambulance Sirens so they can pull over to let them past. Why aren't their laws against this yet?

15) Supermarket Trolley Collectors, you know, the ones who stalk you to your car and insist on hanging around a foot or so behind you in anticipation of grabbing your trolley as soon as you have emptied it. This is really offputting and quite stressful, so I usually end up hurling my shopping frantically into the back of my car any old how, just so I can hand over my trolley. I then arrive home to find half the contents of my bags have now fallen out all over the back seat, and most of my eggs are broken, all because of the "Trolley Stalker".

16) Shop Assistants who say "Have a nice day" when you leave. It isn't as if they actually care a fig whether you have a nice day or not, and it comes across as really false. It happened to my Sister once when she was on holiday in America. She was having a problem accessing her bank funds and ended up talking to the assistant in the bank. After half an hour of this woman being totally incapable of helping her, and my Sister now panicking like mad as to how she would cope with no money, this assistant said, "Have a nice day" as my Sister was leaving the bank virtually in tears. WTF, wasn't it obvious the last thing my Sister was going to do now was 'have a nice day'.

21) People on Bus Stops, or more to the point, the things they say that are truly daft. Classic example, "Are you waiting for a bus", to which you immediately want to answer, "No actually, I just like standing on bus stops talking with idiots like you".

22) Bus Passengers, in this case the ones who only start trying to find the correct change for the driver once they are on the bus. Why on earth didn't they sort out the change whilst they were waiting for the bus to arrive, instead of now holding up the queue leaving most of the poor sods behind them standing outside in the freezing wind and rain while this idiot rummages through their pockets looking for another 50p to make up their fare.

23) Jehovah's Witnesses, Why? Because they invade your privacy to "spread the word", they turn up on your doorstep uninvited, usually when you are right in the middle of watching your favourite TV soap, or were happily relaxing in the bath, and if you are brave enough to let them in, well you won't get rid of them for another three hours whilst they try desperately to convince you that your religion is wrong and that it really is acceptable to let a loved one die because you shouldn't give them a blood transfusion or an organ transplant. If you do successfully get rid of them after a heated debate over your beliefs versus theirs, they will leave you with numerous copies of "Watchtower Magazine" that further attempt to convert you to their way of thinking.

24) Taped Telephone Calls. The ones where you drag yourself out of bed the morning after a late night to answer your phone, and instead of their being a real person at the other end of the line, you get a long pause, and then a taped voice kicks in saying something like, "Hello, this is a UK national awareness campaign. Did you know that you can claim back all of your bank charges blah blah blah". I have usually hung up by the end of the first word now, but it still woke me up or got me out of bed for no good reason. The other morning I had three of these calls in the space of an hour and a half, by which time I had given up on my lie in and been forced to get dressed.

25) Viagra Emails, These are just so very annoying. What are they trying to say, that my Husband has a problem in the bedroom department? Well he doesn't, get over it, (well I try to as much as possible, grins wickedly!) I have tried Viagra, or at least my ex did in Tenerife. Not because he needed it, but more to see what it was like. My advice is simply, don't do it unless you have a baseball bat handy to beat the damn thing down again afterwards, otherwise it really will stay up all night, and quite possibly a good chunk of the next day as well. Us poor women are left sore and drained, and can still feel this strange object poking them in the back the following morning. One old guy I knew (as a friend) said he found he still had an erection the next day after him and his wife tried it, unfortunately he was in the supermarket at the time and could virtually push the trolley hands free. How embarrassing for him and the other shoppers. The only thing I found good about Viagra was it provided an extra coat hook in the bedroom, and anywhere else my ex went. Never ever again.