Happy Thanksgiving to my US friends! And happy It’s Not Thanksgiving! to my buddies who live elsewhere. 

My husband and daughter and I will be cooking and eating WAY too much food today, but I am very thankful that we will get to do it together. In our jammies, if we want to. We are all fine and testing negative and my parents may drop by to eat with us this afternoon, which is such a wonderful perk of having them nearby. And I’m grateful for FaceTime and for everyone’s continued good health and for being able to put goat cheese in my mashed potatoes and for blogs and the bloggers who write them. In fact, I am overwhelmed by all the many wonderful things, big and small, that I have to be thankful for.

But as warm and fuzzy as being thankful makes us feel, I am going in a different direction today. Today, I want to talk about pet peeves. 

I loved Colleen’s post about her social media pet peeves. And then Elisabeth posted about some of her pet peeves… and I may be missing someone else. (If so, link to your post in the comments.) It’s so fun to learn what little things grate on other people! 

What are some of your top pet peeves? The more I think about them, the more I seem to have. I am clearly a very difficult person, but I suppose we all knew that already.

• When there are crumbs in a communal food, like butter, jam, or mayonnaise. EW. I am a firm believer in using a CLEAN utensil to extract these spreads from their container.
• When people don’t answer *all* the questions I ask in an email. I am much less stringent about this in personal communications, but if I have multiple questions that really need answering – like for a work reason – I need all the answers. If there are a lot of questions, I try to put them in bullet points for easy reading. Yet some people still pick and choose only a few to respond to. Whyyyyyyy?
• When people continue a conversation in a brand new email rather than replying to the original email chain. This baffles me. Sometimes I need the previous email to refer to. Just hit reply!
• Replying all. This is only very rarely necessary or useful. I went on about it at length in a previous post, but my general feeling is AVOID.
• When people are late for an appointment and don’t give me a heads up or apologize. Being late happens. I am sometimes late. But it takes two seconds to text or call and let a person know that you hit traffic or have a flat tire or your child is insisting on eating cereal piece by piece! This has been a big headache with so many service people in and out of my house this fall. The majority of them completely miss the appointment time and then show up an hour later and don’t even apologize. Grrr. (Worse, though, is when they show up an hour EARLY! I had two separate service people show up while I was still asleep, and then seem surprised that I was frazzled by their appearance! A WHOLE HOUR!)
• When people charge for something without telling the customer they are going charge for it. We were at a coffee shop/bakery recently and my daughter wanted some water, but didn’t want to drink it out of the cup provided. It was A) Styrofoam and B) the last cup left, and the rim was turned upside down onto the little table that held the water pitcher, which grossed her out. (It grosses me out, too – who knows how clean that table is? But I feel bad that I am passing on my germophobic tendencies to my daughter.) So I went up to the counter, ordered another muffin, and asked if I could have one of the lidded cups they serve coffee in. The person said sure, I paid for my muffin, she handed me the lidded cup… And THEN she charged me 85 cents for the cup. Listen. I want to be very clear here. I do not object to a business requiring me to pay extra for a cup that is different from those they provide for free. That is a completely reasonable thing to do! However, if I had known the lidded cup would cost 85 cents, I would have declined the cup and maybe asked them to replenish the Styrofoam ones. I think you need to tell someone that a thing costs money before you hand it over to them! This reminds me of another bakery where I ordered a latte, and the barista asked me what kind of milk I wanted and listed all the milks they have. I asked for almond milk. And then my bill was higher than I anticipated, and I discovered that they charge 50 cents (or whatever) for almond milk. Which, again, is fine! But I just want to KNOW in advance that I am being charged for stuff.
• Audiobook narrators who pause in weird spots in the sentence. This happened in the book I just listened to, and it was so distracting! And I listened to it at double time – I can’t imagine how annoying it would be at regular speed. Here is an example from the book; I added periods every time the narrator pauses: “Abby tried to relax, to be in the moment, and. Not compare. For example. The way that Mark’s formerly. Soft yielding body. A body that. Had made her feel so safe. Was now taut and muscled. That every part. That had. Once felt gentle and welcoming. Now bulged. Or rippled. Stiff and firm.” I don’t have the physical book in front of me, so I don’t know if this is one sentence or two, but it’s certainly not THIRTEEN.
• Audiobooks that have clearly mispronounced words in them. This is not just on the narrator – I think if there’s a word you don’t know, you should look up how to pronounce it before you read it in a recording, but I don’t actually know how audiobooks come to be, so maybe there’s no opportunity to do that. And, especially if you are avid reader, you may have only ever encountered a word on the page and not aurally, and you may not realize you are mispronouncing a word! But there should be SOME oversight. Some sort of proof-listening process that catches that kind of thing. 
• When people are on their phones during a social interaction. I get needing to have your phone nearby in case of emergency or if you are anticipating a notification of some sort. But it drives me nuts when people check their texts and emails when we’re supposed to be having a conversation. 
• Dirty handles. Someone who shall remain nameless cannot eat yogurt without getting it all over her hands, and then transfers the yogurt to the faucet handle, the handles of the fridge door, the pull on the drawer that holds the trash can, the handle of the dishwasher. Gross.
• When people do not obey the posted regulations at gas stations. I feel like it happens more and more frequently that I see people blatantly flouting safety rules at the gas station. I am A Rule Follower. Even if I think a rule is stupid, or completely unnecessary, I will still do my level best to adhere to it because it is A Rule and I feel like it’s there for a reason. George Costanza voice: We live in a society! And the rules at the gas station seem particularly important, considering that gas is flammable and we could all erupt in a fiery blaze at any moment. I am talking about rules like not using a cell phone while pumping gas. Not getting back in your car while your gas is being pumped. Turning off your engine while the gas is flowing. NOT SMOKING WHILE PUMPING GAS. Some of this feels like common sense, but even if not, the rules are clearly posted on the gas dispensers. Why do people ignore them?! (People do not read; I recognize this.) 
• When interior designers install things because they are trendy or cool but don’t see if they actually work in the space. I have this particular gripe about several things in my house, especially in the kitchen. Maybe one of these days I will do a post about them. But I’m talking about things that maybe appear all the time in magazines or seem really cutting edge or cool but don’t have a real function. Sometimes these things don’t even work as intended! Like those barn doors that have become nearly ubiquitous over the past five or ten years. I have been in several hotels that have a barn door… but they don’t provide the kind of privacy a door should offer. I complained at length about this a little over a year ago, but clearly it’s bugging me anew. I will give you one example from our new house before I stop complaining: there is a tall, narrow, vertically-oriented drawer on the left side of our oven. It is intended to hold kitchen utensils like ladles and spatulas. Super cool! When I first saw it, I was delighted. What a great way to get your kitchen tools off the counter! But it doesn’t work. The utensils splay all over the drawer and get caught in the sides and you can’t fit very many and it’s just… not functional. Since I fully bought in to the idea of not keeping our utensils on the counter, we now keep our utensils jumbled up together in a real drawer which has its own problems.

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here.