Random Things that Bother Me

Not long after I turned 40, I told some friends that I thought I'd become more tolerant of things as my 30s ended and my 40s began. I used as my proof the fact that I've become so much more accepting of the different types of popular music than I did when I was younger. In my early to late teens, I terrorized my two younger sisters whenever they mentioned that they liked a song that was outside of my very narrow "white, either British or American, rock band with no country or funk overtones" window and in college, I fought the introduction of disco music at dorm parties tooth and nail. Well, it seems that I might have become more tolerant of music and now I'm really proud of the diversity of the music I have on my iPod which has blues, jazz, hip hop, neopunk, rock (classic, new, and old-school punk), country, blue grass, reggaeton, and Latin pop music on it. Unfortunately, it seems that this has come with a trade-off and I'm now more intolerant of many more things than I was when I was young. This blog entry tackes some of these things, not in any particular order.

My first topic is so-called "women's fiction" books that needlessly kill off a main character, usually from a cancer that only women can get, because the editors and writers think that any serious book for women must include an unnecessary, tearjerker death. I just read a book that was highly recommended by friends and a couple of magazines and for absolutely no reason, the author killed off the main character with ovarian cancer. It ruined the whole book for me, because when I sit down to read a novel, I want to escape from a world that's punctuated with debates as to whether you can say "HFS file system," because "HFS" stands for hierarchical file system and books with titles like Migrating from Oracle Enterprise Server to WebSphere Enterprise Edition or Tuning up for VOIP. I want to read something that is upbeat and interesting with witty and memorable characters, not someone who is about to die. I have a couple of good friends who are battling cancer in real life now and I can assure you that there's nothing upbeat or witty about it--it's a world full of worry and concern. And people wonder why I look forward to the next Stepanie Plum novel or happily ensconce myself in a hilarious book written by an English or Irish woman.

Another is the sexist fashion on ordinary TV today. Okay, to go along with reading to escape the convoluted and mentally demanding work I do, I watch a lot of detective shows on T.V.--Law & Order, Law & Order CI, Law & Order: SVU, CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, Numbers, Without a Trace, and Bones. I am vastly entertained by the detective and forensics work involved in solving crimes; however, I am not entertained by the fact that most of the female characters on these shows wear tank tops and low cut blouses that show off lots of skin and cleavage, while the men wear normal "business casual" to "casual" clothes that hardly show anything. Now, admittedly, I don't hang around crime labs or murder scenes, but I'm pretty sure that in the real world, on a cold day, the women assigned to these spots are not wearing low-cut tank tops or blouses. In the days when I still went to work in an office, I did not don something that would assure me free drinks from the bar at any given TGI-Friday's and several indecent proposals. Neither did my female co-workers. This is the kind of sexism that makes me crazy--the producers can all say, "Hey, we put women in high positions in our shows, what more do you want?" My answer to that is "The opportunity for viewers to think that the women earned their rank due to hard work and skills and not because they wore something that would get them a job at Hooters."

Then there's Microsoft, the morality police. I admit it. I play a lot of computer solitaire. A lot. I find it a distracting activity that helps me pass the time while I wait for things to download onto my overused, laden with megs of RAM-eating programs. In the old days, if you were stuck with a game where there were two cards with the same color and value (like two black 9s) and only one card with the proper value and suit to put one on (a red 10), if moving one didn't work out for you, you could use "undo" umpteen times to get back to where you have a chance to move the second card. Well, those days were gone with Windows '98, when the "undo" selection could only go back one move. Now I know it's not a good idea to cheat, but I'm plagued with the same color and value issue about 70% of the time that I play Solitaire and I'm sick of being stuck with my first choice. How dare Bill Gates and his crew prevent me from doing what I want in a game?

Another thing that Microsoft, the morality police, does is decide that anything you cut and paste from one Microsoft Office document into another is obviously something that you're plaigiarizing. To stop you from committing a crime that Microsoft believes is heinous only if someone besides them is doing it, they force the formatting, font style, and anything else funky from the document that you are cutting and pasting from into the document you are pasting to. Oh sure, after working with Microsoft Word for 10 years, you might realize that the annoying little clipboard that pops up when you paste something offers the option of making the pasted text match the current document, but most people don't know that. So, you spend a lot of time trying to adjust the style, which actually usually changes after you paste the text until you either scream or your document blows up from too many stules. I don't know about you, but as a 40-something professional who assembles newsletters, proposals, and papers that are written by numerous contributors who sent them to me in emails, I don't appreciate Microsoft's assumption that I'm a high school student writing a paper that is cut and pasted from Wikipedia and it is up to them to save me from myself.

I am also very bothered by the fact that in this modern world, we equate honesty with being rude. How many times have you heard someone say, "I just love [insert rude media personality such as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, or Ann Coulter here] because he's/she's honest." The problem is that usually this media personality is not in the slightest bit honest. In fact, that person is likely to be one of the biggest liars on the planet. So, why then do people think they're honest? The answer is simple: that liar happens to get in front of a camera or microphone and call people horrible names. For some reason, the fact that the person is behaving like a mean bully on the kindergarten playground makes people think that they're honest. And, if you happen to be a nice, pleasant person when you're behind a camera or microphone (like so many of us southern folk were raised to be), then people watching or listening to you will tell their friends that they don't trust you. Can you believe that? They don't trust you because you haven't called a radio or TV host "a lying scumbag" or a "dithering idiot," but instead have tried to behave the way your parents (those who gave a dang about you) raised you. This has even boiled over into sports--coaches who scream at their players, sock them in the stomach, or throw furniture at them are revered for having "the heart of a champion," when they should actually be shunned for being horrible human beings that most likely hate their players. The fact of the matter is that someone who calls someone else nasty names in public is not really anything but rude. And if you look "rude" up in a dictionary or thesauraus, you won't find "honest" as a synonym. Of course one could argue that "dictionary" and "thesaurus" are words that people no longer recognize, but I'll save that rant for another blog entry.

Another thing that bugs me is the popular notion that I want to read books or watch movies filled with characters, including the protagonist, that are whiny, self-indulgent, unpleasant, selfish, and filled with unnecessary angst, usually related to family, the opposite sex, or their jobs. Critics laud these books and films as "dark tales that strip away the niceties of society to reveal the dark side of the human spirit." Why these critics love them is a mystery to me. Personally, I've met enough nasty characters in real life to last me a life time and I don't really care to read or watch fictionalized accounts of their counterparts. Sure, there's nothing wrong with a one-dimensional villain or one or two characters that are either morally or emotionally bankrupt, but please spare me the 500-plus-page tome or the two hour movie that does nothing but showcase the thoughts and actions of a whole town or family full of these "dark" characters. If I want to spend my free time surrounding myself with people like that, I'll make plans to attend the next Republican National Convention or the next meeting of the coaching staff for the dook basketball team.

The last item for this rant is people who have no concept of what words mean when they either use them or force others to adopt them for a particular use. Common examples are the overuse of the prefix "pre," which is interpreted to mean "done before" rather than simply "before"; the interpretation of the word "help" to mean "instructions for how to do something" rather than "assistance" or "aid': "offline" to mean "private" rather than "not currently connected to a network," and "via" as "through or by means of" rather than "by way of" (as in physically using a route to get somewhere); and many other little gems like that. Another example is from an email I received from a client that informed me that a person on the project had been promoted and no longer had the "bandwidth" to participate in the project. At first I thought this meant that the person's Internet connection had been downgraded from a high-speed network to dial-up, but eventually, I realized that the guy writing the email was using "bandwidth" to mean "time and energy." The problem with using "time and energy" escapes me, but apparently "time and energy" has some, dark hidden meaning and the writer had to use something else to describe it. In the last year, I've also run into the phrase "boil the oceans." It took me awhile to realize that the term means to waste time and energy, excuse me, I mean "bandwidth," on something that's impossible. What a horrible metaphor. It brings to mind tsuamis or underwater volcanoes exploding and killing thousands of people. I don't understand what's wrong with saying "we should try to avoid wasting a lot of time and energy on something that is probably not possible"--maybe because it uses the phrase "time and energy"?