h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When something is irritating your eye, and it's impossible not to rub it, which makes it worse.

Most celebrities irritate my eyes, and I'm not allowed to rub them. Anymore. After the last time.

Having a mountain of chores you must complete, on schedule, without deviating from the schedule, which continues throughout the day. After staying up all night.

Who says you must do the chores?

Current petty hate: women in call centres many miles away who think they know more than I do about the problem I'm reporting.
Me (last Thursday) There's something wrong with my TV reception. I can't get any channels below 600, which means no BBC.
She: There's probably something wrong with your aerial. I'll send someone out.
Me:There's nothing wrong with my aerial (long discussion on age of aerial and recent weather conditions)
Engineer (Tuesday) There's nothing wrong with your aerial. I'll get them to send you a new box....

On the plus side, I have discovered the joys of Iplayer on the laptop in bed.

I watch regional bbc on my sky box - I think channel 956 is BBC Yorkshire. But of course, it depends where your sky box is registered.

Question: How common are aerials in Britain today? In America they don't even work anymore because nobody broadcasts the signals... uh... anymore. So of course no one uses them.

Evidently the signals are still being broadcast in Britain, but how many people use aerials?


On another note, when do you think the gradual obsolescence of technology will result in people reading old texts and having absolutely no clue what an aerial is?

Pretty common. That or a dish on all the roofs I can see from my bedroom window.
Subsiduary PH: BBC South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (presumably former S Humberside) doesn't recognise Lincolnshire. About once every three weeks there's a little snippet. I suppose it's as well not to live in interesting times.

Cynical exploitation.

On this occasion, I have just returned from dropping a friend off at Luton Airport. They introduced a £1 drop off charge a couple of years ago. Today it is £2. And of course, he will be coming back too, so that will be another £2.

I really don't see any justification for that at all.

PP.

Easy. They make money that way.

Mr X- aerials will be around for the foreseeable future in the UK (and many other countries?) because we have freeview, which is a digital, subscription and payment-free service received through a conventional aerial.

Of course when the analogue signal was switched off there was the usual scam-merchants trying to sell 'digital' areals. Truth is such devices are *slightly* more optimised to work with digital broadcasts, but if you live in a good reception area, the old twig on the roof will work just fine with the new fangled signals

What, no petty hates in 4 weeks?
Well another one of mine is hidden functions on webpages that only appear when you scroll over them. I understand the anti-clutter ethos, but unless you know these functions are there how do you know to scroll over them? In my opinion they hinder navigation and cause frustration, especially when the hidden functions are as basic as 'log out' or 'refresh'.

I agree. And on a similar note - on my e-mail provider's page they changed the look for a while and the logout was a pictogram hidden in a corner. Every time I logged in I was told off for not logging out last time I used the site, which I couldn't because I didn't interpret the pictogram and couldn't find out how to log out. I tried their help page and it showed the old page with the words "logout" still on it, with a big red circle round it.

Eventually they changed back to the words "logout" and now I can see where to logout again. I fear I am in the generation who just can't figure out pictograms. The worst ones are when you can't even work out from the pictogram which toilet to use.

Over the past 4 weeks I've had several petty hates occur to me, but I can't think of them now.

Here's one: I have just been hit by the gremlins who throw a switch somewhere in the ether and your browser closes in the middle of writing a post on Ask. This happens continually at work - not the browser, but the whole system closes down when you're in the middle of a word - all windows gone - just like that. Does anyone else have to fight Citrix systems?

So I'd better post this before it happens again.

Yeah, pictograms, especially in pub/restaurant toilets; i'll add that to my PH list too I know the owners think it's ever so clever and funny, but honestly, when you need to go (as you may well, rather urgently in a pub) trying to work out which sign looks more feminine or masculine just pisses me right off

The thing about toilets is that you only have a choice of two. If you get it right, where's the problem. if you get it wrong, it could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

[This has been a response from the society of non genderist replies.]

These are my favourites.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7C4IHnxtEPU/Tai4ar28JCI/AAAAAAAAAi4/FYWlNj-WcFk/s1600/piktogramme_lustig.jpg

Here's one: A lot of Youtube videos have those annoying pop-up bubbles in them, but this is not the petty part. They didn't used to be a problem in-and-of themselves, because Youtube helpfully included a little button that you could use to quickly turn them on and off at will. Then Youtube underwent a re-design, for no apparent reason. (Unnecessary changes to perfectly functional programs being a whole other petty hate by itself.) NOW, they wisely still include the option to turn those stupid pop-up bubbles on and off, BUT you have to go through a whole annoying menu to do it. And since they automatically turn themselves back on as soon as you load a new video, you have to go through this menu EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. you want to turn them off.

I've tried asking them to put the button back, but they wouldn't listen.

This is a fairly Petty Hate - people who post more than one review for the same product on Amazon. (It probably happens elsewhere, but Amazon's the site I'm most familiar with.) A product's overall rating is an average of the total ratings, so one person posting multiple high or low rating reviews is bound to skew things. On a number of occasions recently I've seen multiple reviews by various customers. It doesn't allow me to gauge how good a product is, so I end up not buying it.

CD, have you been looking at the Daily Deals for Kindle? Yesterday's was a book about Jane Austen and the same reviewer had given it 5 stars 3 times over 3 months.

Deb

Yep, that's one of them. One of today's has a similar thing - three five-star ratings from A Customer. Now, that may be Amazon's way of doing anonymous reviews, but it does look suspicious.