Imagine the scene: you’re on a date at a restaurant, and you want to wash your hands before you dig into your food, so you get up and go to the bathroom. You immediately notice that something is off.
You get to the threshold of the bathroom, and you start pushing the door to get in. You don’t consciously recognize the peril of the situation, but some primal area of your brain does. This only registers as a subtle chill down your spine.
As you enter the bathroom you spot an immediately recognizable danger. The sink uses a push mechanism. You approach it as a feeling of unease washes over your body. You press that cold button with your elbow, and you’re able to get a 3 second burst of water, certainly not enough to wash your hands. You repeat this process a few times before saying ‘fuck it.’
You walk defeatedly to the hand dryer, stress now coursing through your veins. You finish drying off your still soapy hands, and you turn towards the exit. You now recognize the peril that caused the chill down your spine.
You’ll have to pull the door to exit the bathroom, and no paper towels are provided.
You have three options:
- Open the handle with your bare hands (very bad)
- Use your shirt to open the handle (meh)
- Wait for someone to open the door (bad – you don’t want to keep that date waiting)
You want to choose option b, but you’re wearing a dress shirt, and you don’t have enough fabric to grab the handle fully. Accepting your unfortunate fate, you grab that cold, unfeeling handle which some germ goblin probably licked after sipping up some toilet water. You’re forced to eat your lukewarm food with dirty hands, now tainted with the dread that some horrible bacteria has easy access to wreak havoc upon your body.
The date goes poorly.
This is just one thing that personally annoys me on a deep level. Below I’ll share a few others, perhaps causing some harm to hypothetical individuals along the way.
Imagine the scene: you’re having an easy, peaceful drive through an area full of trees, flowers and wildlife with a bright blue sky to illuminate it all. You’re jamming out to your favorite radio station and everything seems just right. You’ve settled into a fairly relaxed state, when, without warning, the most obnoxious, deafening honking sound rattles your eardrums with the force of a 1000 shirtless Mongolian warriors.
In your shocked state, you miss someone slamming on their brakes in front of you, causing you to crash and suffer a severe concussion. Of course, while your unconscious body suffers from serious internal bleeding, your car’s radio still works, and it plays the message that your now ruptured eardrums were supposed to hear.
“Stuck in rush hour traffic? Then tune into our hour of ad-free music on 93.4159! That’s right! Instead of being inundated with ads like this one, you get to listen to our list of the same 20 songs on repeat without interruption, only on 93.4159!”
When I do use the radio, I usually like to use it as background noise while I digest the day. That’s all fine and dandy until some alarm in an ad startles the living daylights out of me.
As can be seen above, these radio ads also can cause serious damage to hypothetical human beings.
The final annoying thing is buttons on cuffs.
Imagine the scene: you’re getting ready for a beach wedding. Your sunburnt feet and thighs pulsate with an intense burning sensation as you get ready.
All is going fairly smoothly, until it’s time to button the cuffs. You contort your wrist at awkward angles, desperately trying to fit the two buttons through the tiniest of holes. Your hand is cramping up, but you’re determined to finish the job out of spite.
After about ten minutes, you successfully button the cuff on your left hand. Congratulations. Now it’s time to button your right cuff; a task harder than slaying Satan himself because you’re forced to use your non-dominant hand to guide the buttons in.
It’s at this point that your father helps you because it’s a massive pain that slows down the process for everybody involved.
Unfortunately for me, this is not a scenario I have to imagine. After a few weeks of mediating this experience, I still have no earthly idea why buttons are seemingly standard issue for cuffs. Buttoning my cuffs the other week was like trying to put Medusa’s hair into a braid.
As soon as both are seemingly in, the other pops out. It’s already mildly annoying to button cuffs because there’s no scenario where you don’t have to bend your fingers or wrists at uncomfortable angles. I’m sure there’s a here’s how to button a cuff in three easy steps! tutorial out there somewhere, but it probably includes a cuff structure that is completely different from any that I own.
As an aside, tutorial videos are wildly inconsistent. It frustrates me to no end when the tutorial person says “this is not usually how I do it” or “it’s a little messed up.” Then what’s the point in posting a tutorial?
Ever look up how to throw a cornhole bag? Those videos are completely useless because nearly everybody has some weird grip or technique that’s impossible to teach. These guys will say with a straight face, “Yeah, I use the double whammy split reverse grip with a side of fries, so keep that in mind.”
Looking for help on how to throw a bag anywhere else on the internet was also completely unproductive. Everywhere I looked people said, “It all comes down to practice. Just do it a bunch and you’ll be good.” How am I supposed to practice if I don’t even know what to practice? That’s like a flight instructor saying, “Just press a bunch of buttons and see what happens. Practice makes perfect!”
I suppose the lesson here is to simply never leave one’s house. Who needs friends and personal growth when you can be snug as a bug in a rug?