What Bothers Me Most

Dreama recently posted her biggest pet peeves and as I was commenting on hers, I realized it gave me something to write about, so here goes:

On Driving:

1. The only thing worse than someone doing 45 in a 90 zone (apologies to American readers, these will be be kilometers, not miles) is that the same driver usually does 80+ once you hit a 60 (or less) zone.
2. How 'bout the ones who drive really slowly and then breeze right by the stop sign? They had like 10 extra minutes to see it, but still missed it!!
3. People who don't use their headlights in covered areas like underground parking lots and tunnels. I once backed into a black car in an underground parking lot. No lights...
4. Women drivers in trucks and vans. Apologies to those of you who think I'm being sexist, but 4.5 of 6 car accidents and over a dozen close calls have been women driving trucks or vans. Yes, my wife gets mad at me when the truck in front of us crawls through an intersection on a green light (and living in a hilly region, they somehow never accelerate coming up to that hill) and I yell "C'mon lady!!" The problem is, I haven't been wrong about the gender of the driver yet...
5. People who veer left to turn right and people who veer right to turn left.
6. In the town from Hell where I used to work. No one there seems to know how to drive and the city planners have never helped. At one of the busiest intersections in town (and on my old commute to work), instead of making a right-turn only lane they expanded to road to have 3 lanes with about 20 feet of a right-turn only lane branching off. Now people use the right lane to go straight (presumably to get on the freeway which is another 4 lights away) and no one uses the middle lane. This means that every 4th car has to wait at least one light before they can make an easy right turn. It's faster to swing through the strip mall parking lot on that corner than wait who-knows-how long to make that turn. ALSO, another road was widened to 4-lanes and they waited a few days before painting the lines. I was run off the road by an oncoming car who was 4 feet from the right shoulder --2 LANES FURTHER THAN HE SHOULD BE!!!

On Everything Else:

1. This one guy, a husband of one of my wife's friends, who has the uncanny ability to annoy me. I once sat on a committee with this guy and he droned on and on one night building up to his point on an issue. When he finally got to the point (about 40 minutes later) he said, "we can do 3 things: 1 - Do nothing... 2 - ... I forgot what the other 2 were. Sorry." (If I'd've killed it would've been justified). He also phones during the last 15 minutes of Survivor (not like anything happens during the last 15 minutes, right?) to ask me a bunch of questions. They don't have cable (they don't want their kids to see anything negative on TV), so he thought it was a good time to call and ask for my help in setting up his new DVD player.
2. 15 minutes after everyone else has started dinner, I finally get a chance to sit down to eat. As soon as I'm seated, either my son starts screaming about wanting down, or someone else needs to get something and since I haven't started eating yet (!!) I might as well get it, right?
3. My daughter's favorite spot to stop and think about something is directly between someone's line of vision and the TV. A couple of inches in any direction wouldn't block it.
4. My mother, who calls 8 days after the last I called to say she hasn't heard from me in weeks.
5. My sister, who hates it if I call our Mom first on holidays. She's the older sibling, so she should be the first caller, but I'm not waiting until after 5pm on Christmas Day!!
6. Smokers. There's nothing wrong with the occasional cigar, but smokers stink, they're dirty (just look at all the cigarette butts on the sidewalk) and they're ignorant of what they're doing to themselves and others. I knew one guy who got mad at the world when he found out he was terminal with lung cancer --he wouldn't do that to himself so it HAD to be someone else's fault since he refused to even try and quit. My old boss, Big Mama, was a smoker and one time she went cold turkey for about 6 weeks. We had a shouting match in the hallway one day and as she walked away fuming about something, I yelled "go have a smoke! At least you were somewhat likeable then!" All of a sudden, from behind me I heard "Amen." It was one of the administrators...
7. People who have the bass on full in their car stereo. Why?
8. People who think accountability stops at them. I'm thinking about my old office again....
9. Those who don't think appreciating the work and efforts of others is important. Again, thinking of the old office where my boss (From Hell!) would get mad whenever I could get an interdepartmental assignment done quickly when everyone else in our department would drag on and on. I'm a firm believer in "back-scratching" and it has helped out in numerous situations. But where has it gotten me, you ask? Good point. Making the boss jealous doesn't help much... :-)

Okay, I'm sure there are many many others, but I've got another post to do still...