12 Aug 08
As I get older, I never cease to be amazed at the petty selfishness of your average human being as he or she goes about their daily tasks. I just popped up to the post office and, as often happens, all the streets within quick walking distance were bumper-to-bumper with parked cars. Except, that is, for one space which could have comfortably accommodated two and a half cars, which a woman had just parked her 4WD smack bang in the middle of. As she walked from her car I pulled up and politely mentioned that she had taken up two large spaces and that it wasn’t very considerate.
Of course, the modern method of dealing with any problem that is your fault immediately kicked in–denial. Not “you know, you’re right, I wasn’t thinking” or a slightly embarrassed “whoops, sorry, I’ll repark”. No, she gazed like a stunned mullet at her car and muttered some excuse about needing the room to back up. I kid you not, if she needed that amount of room to park, she must spend half her life looking for parking spaces in Sydney. I sighed, said “forgedabouddit” and drove off. I found a place to park a few streets away. Hell, at least I got a little exercise.
Now, is it just me that finds that selfishness annoying? Every time I park my car I think about other people, making sure that I’m not taking up unnecessary space that can be used by others.
#46873 of a continuing series.
Grumpy Rants grumpy
21 Apr 08
Catholic Promo Day will cost NSW taxpayers $86mil plus This is an absolute frackin’ disgrace; why am I paying taxes to promote the Catholic Church?
Grumpy Rants
13 Apr 08
Swap pet sounds for a companionable silence I hate agreeing with this writer, but this time she’s 100% correct! (A stressed-out dog barks its head off as I write)
Grumpy Rants
01 Dec 07
Right wing Christians call to boycott a film they haven’t seen (and a book they most likely haven’t read), even though gutless Hollywood has watered the book’s themes down. Ignorant conservative Christian sensibilities dictating our culture. AARGHH!
Just read the books, they’re brilliant.
Grumpy Rants
07 Mar 07
Brilliant, and exactly correct. If there’s one thing that drives me insane it’s these damn anti-piracy ads on DVDs.
Grumpy Rants
27 Feb 07
Whose bloody stupid idea was it to make cars go beep beep when they’re automatically locked? When you work in a street which is near a shopping centre and people are parking in it all day, this seemingly innocuous sound begins to take on the quality of Chinese water torture. Also, people leave their cars at 3am sometimes, outside houses with sleeping people in them. Didn’t this cross the tiny minds of the perpetrators of this astounding design flaw? Nope, they were too busy devising yet another way for their inventions to disturb the peace. “Engine noise? Check. Fumes? Check. Destroy ozone layer? Check. Annoying little beep beep sound when you lock it? Check! Righto, now for some more refinements to my other masterpiece, the leaf blower …”
Oh, why stop now:
Other Things That Shit Me As I Work From Home
– old men walking by hawking up huge gobs and spitting on the pavement
– council workers parking their trucks just outside and leaving the engine on while they eat lunch
– the same people who feel the need to always shout at each other from one end of the street to the other instead of getting a bit closer to one another
– groups of old women walking by all talking at the same time at about 2000 decibels
– the fact that someone, somewhere in the street is always operating a large power tool, if not a jackhammer
– the house three doors down that has been renovated and painted and now looks like something out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, ruining the character of the row of houses (I mean – blue walls with grey tiles? Argh!)
– people who leave shopping trolleys from the shopping centre (around the corner) in our residential street – not to mention in great numbers in the park nearby
– the screaming kids next door (of course)
– the damn barking dog a few doors down (of course)
– people who tie their dog up outside the shopping centre, resulting in said dog barking non-stop for an hour
– anyone who goes to the shopping centre and parks in this street instead of the huge shopping centre carpark (see shopping trolleys, above)
– people who eat their crap McDonalds food (from the shopping centre) and then leave all the wrappers in the grassy area at the end of the street
– going to the shopping centre and seeing hugely overweight parents feeding their hugely overweight children McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken at bizarre hours like 9am and 4.30pm
– I’m sure there are more
Grumpy Rants grumpy
22 Dec 06
Regular readers may recall a little rant called Hell is other people? back in June. It was sparked off by an altercation with my neighbour, a boofhead who refused to modify his lifestyle the slightest iota despite the fact that our side windows are about a metre apart and our front two rooms share a wall seemingly made of tissue paper.
Every morning I would awake to a deafening SNNNOOORRRTTT!!! as he blew his nose in the bathroom; every Thursday night we would be woken by his child, who stayed one night a week, waking up bawling her eyes out because of some nightmare in the early hours of the morning; every evening I would go to bed with the sound of his TV playing too loud late into the night.
Finally, this jerk moved out of the rental terrace next door and we had a couple of weeks of blissful silence. Surely, we thought, we’d have better luck next time? A nice couple in their late thirties/early forties with no kids or yapping dogs? Is it too much to ask?
Apparently. Yesterday, the gods took their revenge and gave us everything we had before, but turned up the dial marked “Fucked” another couple of notches. A couple with two screaming little kids with voices like flensing knives. One woke up bawling its eyes in the early hours of this morning, pulling me out of sleep. They’ll be at home all day every day and I work at home. The father stayed up til 1am watching TV, but they’ve moved the TV one room closer to our bedroom now. The couple are sleeping in the bedroom next to ours and I can just about hear every time they turn over in their sleep. and – wait for it – the final nail in the coffin. 6am this morning, I’m awoken by a SNNNOOORRRTTT!!!
Sigh. Right now, we we’re looking at the expense of double glazing, sound reinforcing the walls, air-conditioning, and anything else we can find to get a little bit of our sanity back. And trying to work out what we did to deserve such rotten luck.
Tell me your noisy neighbour stories people. What do you do to stave off the madness?
Grumpy Rants
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