Paging Andy Rooney
For those of you who are too young to remember, Andy Rooney was an old (I think he was born old) curmudgeon who had a weekly segment on “60 Minutes” where he griped about life’s little nuisances – skim milk, the accumulated junk in his top desk drawer, what to do with the last bit of bar soap in the shower. Those sorts of things.
It’s a good thing (for him) that Andy Rooney is dead. Because if he weren’t, the daily barrage of small annoyances that we all face today would likely melt his brain.
So, I compiled a list of random annoyances that I’ve encountered over the past few weeks:
>Black Friday/Christmas in July: I am writing this in early August after a month of tripping over “Christmas” or Black Friday in July sales/festivals/emails all over the Internet. Because it’s not bad enough that the holiday shopping season now seems to start 10 minutes after the “back-to-school” sales end. No, if there is one thing the Internet has taught us is that there is no small, stupid, annoying thing that it (the Internet) won’t exploit, magnify and turn up to “11” in order to make an extra 14 cents.
That said, keep in mind: Only 139 shopping days until Christmas.
>Air-filled chip bags: I bought a big bag of tortilla chips the other day. The bag was about 13 inches high and had a clear window at the bottom 1/3 of the bag to show all the delicious chippy goodness I was about to experience. The top 2/3 of the bag was opaque.
When I opened the bag, the chips came up to just above the level of the clear plastic window. In other words, it was about 2/3 empty. There goes my feast.
Now, I know that this junk is sold by weight and not by volume, and that the chip manufacturers will fill their bags with air or argon or whatever inert/exotic gas in order to protect the chip from getting crushed in shipping.
To those who make this argument, I say “Piss off!” You purposely designed the bag to hide its true contents. I get that product marketing is hard and you’re in a cage-death match with 900 other makers of tortilla chips to gain .0001% additional market share, but my gut (which has NONE of your tortilla chips in it) tells me that lying to and misleading your customers is not a sustainable long-term strategy.
#GiveMeFritosOrGiveMeDeath
>While we’re on the subject of packages, let’s talk about how every package, jar, can, box, container, carton and bag now are now hermetically sealed and impossible to open. I am a reasonably healthy man (with heart disease, a bad back, a massive prostate and pretty bad allergies) and unless I have a pair of good scissors and/or a pneumatic jackhammer, I can no longer open anything anymore.
I get it: Keep things fresh. Good aspiration on the part of the marketers. But unless you make things easier to open, people above age 60 are going to be shut out of the market for your products and will slowly, inevitably, starve to death. Or, maybe that is your plan to begin with. Youth culture and all that…
>And (still) speaking of packaging, a lot of us buy stuff online. And the retailers encourage us to reuse the shipping boxes to save the environment. Another laudable goal. But, you have to remove all the old labels, lest the FedEx/UPS/USPS logistics systems get confused. As anyone who has reused an Amazon box will tell you, all packages these days seem to require 3-10 labels, and all are attached with nuclear super glue that would be the weapon of a Marvel comic villain if it were not already being deployed by Big Retail.
Since I know most of you got your holiday shopping done during “Christmas in July”, you now have until December to try to scrape all those labels off. Good luck and Merry Christmas.
>The Real Housewives of [WGAF]: Every time I think that reality TV can’t sink any lower, get more loathsome and appeal to the worst in humanity, reality TV producers reach up their own colons and pull out a gem.
The sickos and their ilk who gave us “Honey BooBoo”, “19 Kids and Counting” (a show that featured a homophobe/pedophile/now-convicted-and-jailed criminal telling us how to live our lives), and “Tiger King”, have now expanded the “Real Housewives” franchise, the premise of which seems to be that no matter what city in the world you visit, there are a handful entitled twats who are willing to debase themselves further for money. If that’s your jam, I mean no offense, but just keep in mind that as long as there is an audience for this shit, the world will continue to be the cultural hellscape it now is. Thanks!
>“Going forward”: I’ve invented a new drinking game. Please don’t read this and steal my idea. It’s HUGE.
The game is simple: Every time some newscaster, news anchor, news commentator, pundit, analyst, podcaster or academic says the words “going (or moving) forward,” drink a shot of strychnine, just to make it all stop.
I am talking about sentences like “Well, Tom, I think the Fed will try to keep a tight rein on inflation going forward.”
Or “Yes, Tina, I think the political situation in the country is only going to get more divided moving forward.”
Or “Yes, Phil. Going forward, it seems that more and more product marketers are going to replace actual product in their packages with plain, old air and charge the same amount.”
I am not sure why there is this wave of “experts” who think that somehow the rest of us don’t understand the concept of time and that it only moves in one direction. It’s as if we’ll be confused that if they don’t say “going forward” we will somehow think that Superman has flown backwards around the Earth and reversed the passage of time so that all the things they are predicting happened last week.
You have to be able to stomach watching ANY newscast on TV or listening to ANY news-based radio program in order to play this game but trust me: You will hear it – guaranteed – within 10 minutes. And, once you hear, you’ll never be able to UN-hear it. You’re welcome.
>Forgetting things: I had another little annoyance for this post, but I forget what it is. Going forward, I will try to jot them down.