Receipts, unsolicited ad-mail, and other random scraps of paper...

I've been pondering more and more lately as we move further into this fabulous, amazing, whiz-bang electronic age that we are living in why I still manage to accumulate random little scraps of paper in my pocket and junk mail in my mailbox.  While buying a bag of dog food today, I acquired no less than three little scraps of paper from the retailer that got jammed into my pocket because there was no other option in which to place them.  Well, I guess I could have shoved them...

Ummm...

Nah, I actually like the owners of my local dog-food-procurement establishment.

At any rate, while going to another store afterwards and digging for some change in my pocket, I encountered these three little random scraps of paper in addition to some from a previous foray into a store, and became moderately annoyed when these scraps of paper impeded my ability to find the change I knew was there.

If I had one of these puppies I bet I could get my Utopia
established quicker.  Image from: 7 reasons to embrace
 junk mail from 7reasons.org. Junk mail still sucks, but the
post is amusing.

Regarding ad-mail, I've actually managed to finally get the mail man to stop putting unsolicited ad-mail in our mailbox by taping a small note inside the door asking him to refrain from filling our box with this crap.  I had requested it be stopped when we first got our mailbox, but obviously he forgot at some point and started stuffing it back in there again.  Hence, the reminder will stay in our mailbox for the rest of eternity, because I am tired of bringing this stuff home and jamming it straight into a recycle bag.

And Mr. Credit Card Pre-Approval that makes it through because it's actually addressed to me?  You can just fuck right off.  Although I guess it would come in handy if I wanted to buy all the crap in the unwanted flyer from the local big box store.

Long live consumer debt!

Then there is the latest, greatest, monthly catalogue from whatever online store I frequent.  The key word here being online.  If I wanted to buy any of your splendiforous crap, I'd go back online, to your online website where I find your online catalogue, and order my stuff online.

Speaking of online, I get a packing slip in anything I order online.  Why?  I know I ordered it, I was expecting it, and I'm not confused when this item arrives in my mailbox or via the UPS man.  I even have a confirmation e-mail of what I ordered, and am perfectly capable of checking the contents of the package against the confirmation e-mail.

My point in all this you ask?

Believe it or not, birds will actually make nests of this shit.
Hopefully the ink isn't toxic, however.  Mutant birds ain't
really my cup of tea.  Likely to be a remake of Hitchcock's
The Birds.  Now that was some scary shit.

I'm tired of having to shred, burn, or otherwise annihilate little scraps of paper that contain personal information.  And I'm tired of having to recycle crap that is designed to make me want to buy some other cheap piece of crap consumer good from some country halfway around the globe, or inform me about crap that I really could care less about.

You can go on until you're blue in the face to me about how a lot of this paper is produced from, and in turn recycled, blah, blah, blah, but the reality is if we didn't produce all this unwanted advertising and receipts and other junk in the first place we wouldn't even have to bother having a recycling infrastructure in place to take care of it.

Furthermore, if I'm using my bank card and Airmiles card to complete a purchase on your fancy, whiz-bang computer of a till, you likely have all my information... why do I need a little scrap of paper to return a product when you can just swipe my bank card and get all the information you need?  Because let's face it, despite all their assurances that it's all transparent and they don't store it, the reality is that all the information your favourite local retailer would need to have a no-paper receipt infrastructure in place is all out there floating around on the great, wide, nether-reaches of the internet anyways.  If the information can be transparent going in one direction, it can be transparent going in the other.

In the meantime, I'll just keep dreaming of my Utopia where there is no crap advertising flyers or little scraps of paper containing personal information.

My day will come eventually.

Yup.  That about sums it up.

Age and theories on annoying people

I'm getting old.

Now... you all might call this a blinding flash of the obvious, as really we all get old.  It's kind of inevitable.  Those that know my age might scoff at my assessment, saying I'm really not that old.  I am still called a young'un from time to time, but really it's all relative.

About 5 years ago, I began to suspect that I was getting a little older when the local classic rock station started playing music that I had enjoyed back in high school.  It had never occurred to me before that the definition of what is considered 'classic' rock would change as the decades rolled on, slowly encompassing yet another decade into it's broad repetoire that began back before I was even conceived.   

Harsh reality, however, set in today that it's only a matter of time before I'm sitting on my front porch, brandishing Husband's shotgun (or a cane, for all you anti-gun ninnies) yelling at some young punk to "GET OFF MY LAWN!!". 

(For the purposes of this exercise, let's please imagine that (a) what I have can actually be termed a lawn; and (b) my 'lawn' isn't a couple of hundred feet from my front porch and hidden behind a small forest. Anyways, continuing on before my train-of-thought derails... this happens when you get old too... wait - what was my point here?  Oh yeah!  Ahem...)

The cause of this harsh realization you ask, oh fair reader?  Allow me to share.

I've always been highly annoyed by high school kids, even while in high school.  The problem has only gotten worse as time has passed, to the point where I'm now not only annoyed by high school kids, but also college and university kids and those just fresh out of these supposed sage institutes of higher learning.  This point was driven home to me today while overhearing a late-twenty-something year old gossiping on the phone to a friend about this person and that person while going all, like, what the hell?! and drama queen'ish.  And try as I might, I could not HELP but overhear because my personal space was being invaded and this girl had little concept of 'inside voice'.

Highly annoying.  Seriously.  You have no idea.  You know how I mentioned that shotgun earlier?? 

At any rate, it's not that I'm scared of the grey hair, or the wrinkles, or the incontinence (okay, okay... scratch that from the list.  Yeesh, a girl tries to make a joke...), it's just I have realized that at some point it is exceedingly likely I will be annoyed by most of humanity. 

Lemme 'splain...

Original theory on the Annoyance Level/Age relationship.

In the graph on the right, you see what my previous suppositions were on the whole age/annoying level matter, also referred to as my Original Theory on Annoying People, or OTAP for short.  I had always assumed that as an annoying individual aged, they at some point reached a level of maturity where they realized just how annoying they were, and simply grew up and became mostly un-annoying, useful members of society.

Now, you'll remember that earlier I mentioned that it seems the age category that I consider to contain annoying individuals seems to be expanding.  This would imply two things.

1. The annoyance of an individual is not, in fact, a factor of their age but is instead a factor of our changing society, in which people are becoming more self-centred and oblivious to their effect on the world around them.  Logic then leads us to the conclusion that the level of annoyance of an individual is more a function of your year of birth as opposed to age at any given moment (i.e. your annoyance is a function of societies morales that shaped you as you were growing up).

2. children in the 0-13 year categories are exempt from my theory irregardless of year of birth, because I am not annoyed by kids under approximately the age of 13 or so.  In fact, I'm actually a huge fan of kids and envy their ability to still be all innocent and exempt from all the shit that daily life has to throw at most of us.  Point, you ask?  We should all take a lesson and be more like children.  But that's yet another blog post.

New and Improved theory on the Annoyance Level/Age
relationship.

In order to illustrate my New and Improved Theory on Annoying People, or NITAP for short, I present another graph.  As you can see on this graph at the right, I illustrate how at some point in society there was some form of massive, singular, shattering societal event which began creating a cornucopia of annoying individuals.  While I couldn't pinpoint one event (which I guess kills the 'singular' part of that description), there was a lot that went down in the 1980's that shaped the world as it is today, so it shouldn't be too hard to imagine a societal shift happening within that time frame.    


Now after all that theory and postulating, I should add some caveats.  While I do believe NITAP does dominate in the creation of annoying individuals today, I suspect that OTAP does operate within NITAP at some sub-level.  There is even a possible third theory that may operate within NITAP based on the societal circles one operates in, but it's still a work in progress.  It would, however, explain individuals like Paris Hilton and assorted other celebrities.  Finally, in the interest of maintaining harmony with my younger work colleagues I should add the caveat that there are some people who while they fit the parameters of NITAP I don't find annoying at all.


In the meantime, however, I believe I will just simply accept the inevitable that I have a few more grey hairs today than yesterday, there will be an increasing number of individuals I find annoying, and sit back, relax, and wait for spring.  For this is when the front porch will become less of a frozen wasteland and a more inviting locale to sit back and yell at young punks on my 'lawn'.

Stay real, gentle reader, and remember you're only as old as you feel upstairs.