Tue 22 Jan 2008
Inefficiencies. Speed-bumps. Hurry-up-and-wait. What are the things that waste your time, at work, at home, out and about?
What are the longest delays you deal with? What are the little Death By A Thousand Cuts annoyances that stack up in the long run?
And what would you do — if you had your way, or if the technology existed — to improve the situation?
Posted by Josh Millard10 answers so far!
Okay, let's hear it.
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People in line ahead of me who pay by check. Please take the ten minutes and stop by your bank (or call them) and get a debit card.
Poorly designed intersections and stop lights. You know, the kind that turn red when no car in the other direction is coming, or when you hit red light after red light.
TV commercials… yes, a necessary evil. Defeated by DVR.
1. Redundancies in funding requests. Can’t I just write one big grant instead a million little ones over the year?
2. Power-hungry passive aggressives who insist on in-person lengthy meetings so that they can defend their latest artistic blunder. Can’t we just talk over the phone so I can escape easier?
3. Cooking & Prep. Can’t I have a Star Trek-style replicator? While I’m at it, I’d take a transporter too.
Starman: I hear you. My mom refuses to use a debit card. She still writes checks. I hate it. At least places like Wal-Mart can print the check for you.
Red lights usually don’t bother me unless I’m in a real hurry to be somewhere. Slow-moving trains, however…
When I worked at an answering service, very recently, I hated it when people didn’t have all the info they needed and I had to wait for them.
My spinning mental wheels are the biggest time-waster for me. Whether it’s that I’m tired from all the obsessing I’ve done over the day, or too distracted to do a job right, or too forgetful to turn the dryer on before I leave thew laundry room, it’s my own hurried thinking that makes me have to hurry later on. ALSO VISTA.
Technology that is supposed to save my time wastes my time. Jesus Horse, I’ve got four e-mail accounts (two dedicated to separate online classes, one general work, one home), two voicemails, plus snailmail. Yeah, instantaneous communication, hooray, etc., but really, it’s just more stuff to sift through than I used to have to cope with. Also, remotes. You have several remotes to keep track of and have to keep them straight and clean and know where they are, so you get a universal remote, which then has to be programmed, and then as soon as you acquire some new gadget, there’s a new remote on top of the universal one. If I add up the time I spend on all that niggling crap, I could have walked over to the electronic item and changed the channel or adjusted the volume or what have you about 150 times.
I probably need to toss all this shit into the yard and head down the road 20 miles to join the Amish.
Addendum: I will never, ever, ever go to an electronic planner of any type because those things are the granddaddy of all timewasters.
Check out lines. I can’t wait till every place with more thean three cashiers has a self serve option. The Self serve checkouts are easily 50% faster 95% of the time. Of course part of that is because they usually have no line because the neoluddites are afraid of them. Still the through put is amazing. Scan, swipe, gone.
Our grocery store has self serve checkout lines. At first there were four mini stations, designed to serve the “10-items-or-fewer” crowd, but now they’ve converted two of those into standard checkout lines with long conveyor belts and a spacious bagging area so that anyone—even the proprietor of the local Mexican restaurant who inexplicably purchases his establishment’s weekly black bean supply (about three hundred 12 oz. cans’ worth, it would appear) at the grocery store instead of from a wholesale distributor— can do it themselves.
I was recently in one of these lines behind an elderly gentleman who only had a few items but insisted on finding the bar code on each one before displaying it to the scanner. Then he placed it gingerly on the conveyor belt. Suddenly, an automated yet distinctly Midwestern, female voice boomed, “Unexpected item in the bagging area! Please remove the item!” Before he could act (again, he was probably older than most corporations, but a more agile person wouldn’t have acted quickly enough, I think), the computer declared, “Please wait for assistance!”
At this point, a checkout lady whom technology had relegated to self checkout lane overseer ambled over and hit a few buttons to reactivate the recalcitrant device. The time it took her to walk back to her station and for my elderly lanemate to again agitate the computer were identical. She sighed and came back over while he scratched his bald head in puzzlement. More intense than my desire to strangle them both was the urge to rip the computer off its mounting, tie it to my bumper and drive off gleefully at a high rate of speed. The jail time would be worth it.
I am convinced that Homo Sapiens is a species genetically predisposed to being annoyed by inefficient passage of time. Remember dial up? It took minutes (minutes!) to access the web and we now scoff at those wasted moments listening to the computer bleep and whir as it navigated the proper tubes. And yet, we were tapping into the vast knowledge and communication lines of all of humanity! Who cares how long it took, this was amazing what we were doing! And now, I get annoyed when my browser takes more than a few seconds to load. When we all access the web via wetware embedded in our brains, I have no doubt we will seethe at the slow rate with which our synapses handle the information.
To answer the question: everything. Every god damned thing annoys me. But I’m only human.
Ah, the “hurry up and wait” crap. It irks me because most of the time it’s perfectly avoidable. The mister, “Hurry up, the movie is gonna start soon!” And we get there 45 minutes before it starts. Argh. Nothing else really bothers me as I’ve learned to not let it bother me. Life is too short.
1. Domestic chores. The older I get, the more I resent the constant cycle of cleaning. I think it’s magnified because I work out of the house, so it’s hard to ignore dustbunnies that appear out of nowhere when I just swept yesterday. Fortunately my husband is willing to pitch in and he’s also not OCD about super cleanliness, like some other people I’ve lived with or the folks on TV. If I had the disposable income, I’d hire a maid service for things like cleaning the bathroom, and drop off my laundry instead of doing it myself.
2. Phone interruptions. I have to keep my phone on in case my current client calls me. There are a few people who think it’s fine to call me whenever they feel like chatting because I am home. I don’t always answer, but sometimes I do, just to tell them I’m busy, so they won’t keep calling back. They’ve already interrupted my train of thought just by calling me. I wish there were some way to temporarily filter these calls to go to voicemail without my phone ringing. As far as I can tell, I can only block their numbers on my cellphone, which will shunt them to voicemail, and then remove them from my blocked list later (too much trouble). My home phone, which is Vonage VOIP, doesn’t have selective call blocking; it only blocks unknown callers. If I put it on “do not disturb,” my client won’t be able to get in touch with me. I really appreciate caller ID, however, and just have to train myself to silence my cell’s ringer when someone calls at an inopportune time. I have no problem shutting the damn thing off when I go out to dinner, however; everyone else can suck it and call someone else to chat with when I’m enjoying me some twin lobstahs.
3. Meal planning. I like to cook, but sometimes I get tired of planning meals and executing them. Once this project is over, maybe I’ll get back to enjoying it more (conversely, I made coq au vin tonight, but I then again, I took today off). I’m determined to use my KitchenAid mixer more often this year, even if it is a pain in the ass to move it from its storage space to the tiny counter (it’s awesome for cheesecake). I also bought a new food processor recently and invented a chicken with carrot casserole that tasted like chicken soup (shredded the carrots and ground up the chicken with onions and garlic, covered it with biscuits in the last 15 minutes of baking, yum!).
I’m not too bothered by check out lines. I don’t shop at big box stores very often and did most of my holiday shopping online. My grocery store check out lines seem to move pretty fast and the times I’ve had to wait due to a price check or other snafu have been far and few between. As far as people writing checks, I take offense to that sentiment. I grew up writing checks, and debit cards are a recent development that not everyone has glommed onto. My elderly father pays with cash out of a wad from his pocket, and it might take 2 minutes more than your debit card, but his money is still good. I’ll take the karma for all those poor people who haven’t updated to your standards if you all will not send them evil thoughts in a freaking grocery checkout line.
All in all, most of my annoyances are far and few between and are largely self-imposed. I’m learning to blow off the unimportant stuff because the tradeoff has so many benefits. No commute, client likes what I do, I can wear what I want, my time is flexible and I’m more productive when I am working as a result. No outside job is worth it if it lowers my self-esteem (advice from my dad, the guy who annoys you in your checkout line, who happens to have a PhD in Education and may have taught your teachers how to teach from his PhD video project, so cut him some slack).