Friday 5: Minding Your Peeves and Qs

1. What’s one of your language-related (that is, something people say or write) pet peeves? I’ll give you two–when people hyphenate adverbs, like “highly-trained employee.” That’s wrong. You don’t need a hyphen there. The second is when people use “of” in place of “have,” like saying “could of” or “should of” instead of “could have” or “should have.” I get that it’s because when we talk, they’re hearing the contractions “could’ve” and “should’ve” and are thinking that sound is an “of,” but that makes no sense. What would saying you “should of gone” to the party even mean?
2. What’s one of your dining-out-related pet peeves? I don’t know that I have any, honestly. I don’t like it when people are rude or don’t tip, but I feel like that doesn’t really count as a pet peeve if the issue is people are just blatantly being terrible.
3. What’s one of your technology-related pet peeves? That at work, we’re super restricted as far as what changes we can make on our computers–like only being able to use certain browsers and not being able to change the screen resolution. Basically, having to have Systems do almost everything. I get why because not everyone is technologically savvy and security is important to the job, so you can’t let people do whatever they want, but when I got a new monitor and the screen resolution was wrong and made everything super tiny and therefore hard to see, I knew exactly what I needed to do and how to do it but didn’t have the permissions, so I had to have Systems come up and do it for me.
4. What’s one of your television-watching pet peeves? Loud commercials and bad closed captioning, but that’s because I work in that industry and I nitpick. Does being nitpicky about shows count? I know I talked about this recently, but when you watch a lot of TV for your job, you start to pick out how formulaic almost all of it is–which I get to tell a full story well in a half-hour or hour, you kind of need–but there’s honestly very little difference between your average sitcoms and medical dramas and police procedurals.
5. What’s something you do that you know peeves others? I fidget. It’s not so bad anymore, but I used to joke that I’m hell to sit close to in a movie theater because I can’t get comfortable and shift a lot. I also walk kind of slow for some people, but faster than most, so I’m not sure what to make of that. Similarly, I don’t drive as fast as some people do on the interstate–mind you, I speed, just not as excessively as some people, and there’s a certain type that needs everyone to drive as fast as them. There’s also a certain type who thinks pulling out in front of people is totally fine and expect everyone else to do it, too.

As always, from Friday 5.