Blogocentric Formulations

Three Things #5: Pet Peeves

I'm piggybacking on Tornado Dodger 's prompt for blog posts about "three things" in a variety of categories. I'm not sure if this is going to be a daily thing, a "post them all this weekend" thing, or a "whenever I get around to it" kind of thing, but I'm committed to blogging about everything on her list. For reference, the categories are:

Theme: Three Things
Three things you can’t go without.
Three celebrity crushes.
Three favorite book characters.
If you had to evacuate your home because of a natural disaster, what three things would you take with you?
Three pet peeves.
Three things you’d do if you weren’t so afraid.
Three favorite TV shows.

I might as well take these in descending order, so here are my three pet peeves.


Hypocrisy. I can't stand hypocrites, even less when they come up with a B.S. justification for why it's okay to do the exact opposite of the thing that they just did. Whether it was my parents saying the classic, "Do as I say, not as I do" as I was growing up, all the way up to the heights of power when Mitch McConnell refused to have a hearing on Obama's Supreme Court nominee because "during an election year, the people should have a say in who's seated" but promised to seat Kennedy's replacement *gasp* in an election year, it drives me crazy when people have different or fluid standards, especially when the purpose is to exert power or excuse personal shortcomings. I'm fairly easy going in most cases, but the minute someone shows themselves willing to make exceptions for themselves or their tribe while expecting others to "be better" and meet higher standards, it sends my annoyance meter straight to an 11. I have a really hard time trusting or even being friendly to people when they choose to act like that.


People who treat subordinates poorly. Whether it's your assistant or the IT guy at work, your server at a restaurant, the repair guy that comes to your home, the flight attendant on your plane, or your kids, I get really worked up when I see someone treating another human being poorly when that other person is in a position that prevents or discourages them from standing up for themselves. Working in Hollywood, I see this a lot... people who will be perfectly kind to contemporaries, downright sycophantic to superiors, and yet treat subordinates in a completely dismissive if not downright abusive way. I've heard all the excuses and justifications. "Things just have a way of rolling downhill" (meaning his boss yells at him so he in turns yells at his assistant). "It's a hazing thing. I was verbally abused as an assistant so it's a rite of passage my assistant has to go through." The bottom line is that I don't care how nice you are to me when you have to be, if you can't be nice to me when you don't have to be... and, by extension, if you mistreat people you know won't fight back... I have zero respect for you no matter how nice you are to the people you think matter.


People who aren't aware of their surroundings. The driver who stops in the middle of the road and blocks traffic to drop off passengers. The person who walks into you at the grocery store because he or she is too absorbed with their phone. That group of people who are hanging out to talk in the middle of a thoroughfare rather than off to the side. The neighbor in the adjoining apartment who has loud parties on a work night. It drives me crazy when people are so wrapped up in themselves that they don't have any awareness of how they're affecting the people around them with their behavior, even more so when they do become aware of it and continue with the behavior as if they can't be bothered to take anyone else's needs or concerns into consideration.