Annoyances

From WhyNotWiki

Annoyances  edit   (Category  edit)

Contents 1 . 2 Politics/Government 3 Business/Marketing 3.1 Being put on hold for more than 2 minutes 4 Software 5 Internet: The Web 6 Technology 7 Leadership 8 Climate/Weather 9 Traffic/transportation 10 Language 11 Names 12 To do

[edit] .

• FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) (AKA, Microsoft's business practices)

[edit] Politics/Government

• The two-party system
• Having only lousy candidates to choose from and having to decide which one is the lesser evil
• The only way to contact legislators being via snail mail or phone

[edit] Business/Marketing

• Things that arbitrarily expire (like gift certificates, phone cards, ...)
• Marketing drivel, hype, deception; portraying things as better than they really are; self-promotion
• "Customer service" representatives (via phone or e-mail) that don't know enough to help you, and are only able to give generic useless information that you already knew

[edit] Being put on hold for more than 2 minutes

In my opinion, this is simply unacceptable. I don't want to waste my time, sitting there and doing nothing for 15 ... 30 minutes, especially when I'm not even sure that the person at the other end will be able to help me even if I do finally get through to them. Plus (for those of us not lucky enough to have a hands-free headset), holding a phone to my ear for 5 minutes or more can give me a sore neck. And (again, unless I have a hands-free headset), I can't really do much else while I'm waiting.

Sure, I could put the phone down and hope I hear them saying "hello? hello?" on the other end before they give up on me and hang up.

Seriously, folks. If you're that busy and don't have time for me right now, just take my number and call me back when you do have time. Don't make me suffer just because you're understaffed or this is a period of peak call volume. I'd much rather receive a call back in an hour or two then be held on hold for 10 minutes.

[edit] Software

• Projects on RubyForge (or elsewhere) that exist but haven't released any code
  • Why bother making a project and getting our attention if you have nothing to share, nothing to show? Please, just wait until you have a release ready. I've seen too many projects that are > 2 years old and still have no release.
• How Firefox leaks memory like a sieve...
• When people use a specific blog post as the "home page" for their plugin or other software release.
  • The blog post has a fixed url, with date encoded in it (example), and the content thereof, I believe, should be static (not changed) if it's a blog. But making it the official published "home page" means that they have to keep updating that entry with the latest news, changes, bug-fix announcements, etc.
  • If you have to use a blog system at all (which I wouldn't recommend), then could you at least make your home page be a category or something, so that it's short (mydomain.com/articles/category/my_plugin_name) and so that you can go to that page and see the latest blog posts on that topic, so you can just post a new post if you have new information, rather than feeling compelling to modify an old post just because everyone's links are pointed to the old post rather than the category that contains your old post.
• Companies who use fly the "open-source" flag as some kind of bragging right or something but who are blatantly commercial and greedy, using the "open-source" buzzword solely as a means to help promote their commercial product, having only very reluctantly released their software as open-source, usually making the link to how/where to download the free version really hard to find, there being so many more links for ways you can buy their commercial version. (See Commercial open-source contradiction)

[edit] Internet: The Web

• When web site maintainers gratuitously move pages to different locations and don't provide a redirect, so if you've linked to the old location, you now have a broken link.

[edit] Technology

• Non-user-replaceable batteries
• Devices requiring a USB device cable to be of any use but not coming with one; USB cables being ridiculously overpriced

[edit] Leadership

• those who abuse their power
• lack of transparency from those in power

[edit] Climate/Weather

• People who claim to love this warm weather we're having, but then turn the air conditioning way up so that it's unnaturally freezing inside!
• When, after having a lot of consecutive warm days so that we're used to warm weather, we have a cool day, but the air conditioner still stays set to cool rather than heat.
  • I find the cool air blowing on me on a cool day to be uncomfortable and annoying. Even if it supposedly is the same temperature inside as usual (which is usually too cold anyway)(73 dF), it just seems wrong and wasteful to be wasting any energy on cooling down the building when the natural indoor air temperature (as derived from the outside temperature; the temperature that would exist if no heating/cooling unit were in place) is sufficiently cool to be comfortable (if not too cool). I think it would be feel better to have it on heat; but if I had to compromise, I would certainly be happy just to have the heater/cooler off altogether!

[edit] Traffic/transportation

• traffic jams
• being cut off (When I like the amount of following distance I have from the car in front of me, thank you very much, but someone cuts in front of me (and cuts my following distance in half).)

[edit] Language

• Euphemism
• Political correctness
• When people say "an historic" instead of "a historic".
• How we don't have a good name for Native Americans. Calling them "Indians" (which many people still do) is ambiguous and incorrect because they don't come from India. Calling them "American Indians" is less ambiguous but just as wrong. Calling them "Native Americans", well, it works, but that's too long of a name (5 syllables!) for me to want to use it in everyday conversation (so I'll probably keep lapsing back to "Indians"). It's also slightly ambiguous, though, because shouldn't anyone who's born in America be considered a native American (using the same criteria that makes someone a native Australian or German, for example)? One's "nativeness" seems to be distinct from one's racial or ethnic background. Or maybe there are two meanings of "native", in which case "Native American" is all the more ambiguous.

[edit] Names

• "Web 2.0" -- As if it had some kind of concrete, agreed-upon meeting! It's just a buzzword. Avoid using it please.

[edit] To do

Aliases: Peeves See also: Problems