22 October 2006

Even More Annoyances

A few more, from my never-ending supply:

  • Reporters who insist on pontificating on The Way Things Are without any knowledge thereof, especially regarding the financial status of various elements of the entertainment industry. The WSJ is the latest to fall into this trap; fortunately, you don't have to take just my word for the reporter's ineptitude. Then there's further followup by Real Publishing Industry Insiders.
  • Suburban uhhhhsault vehicles (SUVs). Need I say more?
  • Urban/suburban planners who persist in marking the parking lots for subcompact and compact cars in the face of the prevalence of minivans, pickups, and those SUVs from the previous item in large parking lots. Unfortunately, I can't exactly tell Mallwort, Targét, Pierre Menard's, and the like to fix the vehicle-door-dings in my own car (which is a compact).
  • Creditors (like utilities, phone companies, and the like) who send you those little windowed return envelopes with the window placed so that one of the USPS's standard portrait stamps (such as the Thurgood Marshall issue of a couple of years ago) overlaps the window... and then take two extra days to process your payment if you put it in a different envelope.
  • Magazines that hide the date or volume/issue information a variable number of pages inside, instead of putting it on the cover away from where the address gets printed. Since that's the part of the cover most likely to get munged during delivery, one would think that identifying information would be placed away from it...
  • Stubborn, old-school publishers, editors, agents, and authors who insist loudly that only Courier 12-point can ever appear anywhere in a book-length manuscript. And that a manuscript must use underlines instead of italics. (The less said about those who advocate for Times New Roman, the better. If only HP had chosen Century as the default proportionally spaced font in those early LaserJets...)

Obviously, some of these annoyances are more petty than others.