Things That Drive Me Crazy

Number 27: Having to flip through pages and pages and pages and pages of ads before I get to the Table of Contents in a magazine, as I do this month for the new issue of GQ. I get it that ads keep the cost of the magazine down, and I'd rather have the ads up front so they're not interrupting the features, and yes I do work in the magazine world, and blah blah blah all that stuff, but you know that there's a problem when the TOC doesn't appear until page 86 and magazine feels the need to tell you on each of the three pages where you'll find each successive page of the TOC because they're practically buried. I say move half the ads to the back of the book. No one really looks at that many ads in a row anyway. At least I don't.

Number 28: Buying tickets for things. I used to go to a lot of concerts, but for about a year I didn't go to a single one, partly because it was so damned annoying and frustrating to get tickets. Even if you were a member of a fan club (which I was) and got to take advantage of a presale (which I did), the tickets available in that presale weren't always the better ones. And on the public onsale date, even if you kept hitting "refresh" on your web browser on the Ticketmaster web site, at the minute the tickets went on sale, somehow they were either already nearly sold out or you couldn't buy very good seats. And don't get me started on buying on the phone. I didn't even try to buy Red Sox tickets this year. So it made me more frustrated to see that my two recent experiences with Ticketmaster — buying tickets for Jamie Cullum and The Killers — weren't any more pleasant. Thankfully, I got tickets to both events. But I didn't enjoy it.

Number 29: The people who work in my building on the lower floor and can't walk down one flight of stairs to get there. We only have one elevator working, and it's a slow-moving one. There's one floor below the ground floor, and it's easily accessible, and it's beyond me why the people who work there wait and wait for the elevator to descend when they could more easily just take the stairs. While I'm on the building subject, I also hate the people who go out for a smoke and stand right in front of the door so I have to walk through their smoke to get anywhere. Yuck.

(Alright, fine. So the list is a lot longer at this point than 29. Didn't want you to think I was that irritable. These are just the things that are annoying me today, right now.)