What annoys you? (1 Viewer)

[Jeffrey D]

Just got towed to a garage- they got a bunch of trucks ahead of me. Maybe they can get to it tomorrow. Ugh.

Update- I called the service garage to see if they have a shuttle service so I can get there from the hotel to wait on my truck. They told me they don’t have that. Lame.

 

[Kevin Hewell]

Truck just broke down- quit running, and I’m blocking a travel lane on a major artery just south of Cincinnati.

That sucks.

 

[Jeffrey D]

That sucks.

What sucks even harder is I have to drive a rental car 3 hours to my company’s yard to switch into a temporary truck. Getting in and out of trucks is a huge pain in the ass.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Falling out of bed!

 

[Clinton McClure]

Falling out of bed!

Ouch!

 

[Robert Crawford]

Ouch!

That and it messed up a dream I was having at the time.

 

[Jeffrey D]

A customer’s complete apathy towards a driver. I’ve been waiting almost 5 hours past my appointment time for my unload to be completed. This is unacceptable. If I had to go through this on a regular basis, I wouldn’t be out here any longer.

 

[Jeffrey D]

When trains stop and sit, blocking roads. The cherry on top of this shit sundae week is I’m stuck, and can’t risk inventing a detour.

 

[BobO'Link]

When trains stop and sit, blocking roads. The cherry on top of this shit sundae week is I’m stuck, and can’t risk inventing a detour.

While there's no federal law about the time a train can be stopped, blocking a road/crossing, there *may* be local ones (In AR it's: "No railroad company operating in the State of Arkansas shall cause a public grade crossing to be blocked from the hours of 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. in excess of ten (10) continuous minutes from the time the first roadway user is blocked at the crossing"). We have a double crossing here (there's about a mile between the crossings) where it's common to get stuck between *two* different trains for up to an hour... and there's *no* way out if one of those trains doesn't move.

You can also just go here:

Blocked Crossings

Blocked Crossings Incident Reporter

www.fra.dot.gov

And file a complaint - not that it'll do much good but you never know...

If you want to know more about how the railroads are regulated, go here:

Federal Railroad Administration

Enabling the safe, reliable, and efficient movement of people and goods.

railroads.dot.gov

 

[Clinton McClure]

When people blow up food in the microwave then are too lazy to clean up after themselves.

 

[Clinton McClure]

Coming downstairs early in the morning to discover the thermal expansion tank for my water heaters decided to wash the walls of the heater closet under the staircase. I shut off the water and spent half the morning drying out the floor of the closet and trying to get a plumber out. The plumbing company I usually use can’t get here until Friday. My second call was to a local company who initially installed the heaters and tank and they couldn’t get here until next week. My call to a third company that I’ve used in the past was the charm because a plumber should finally be here within the next two hours.

 

[The Drifter]

Coming downstairs early in the morning to discover the thermal expansion tank for my water heaters decided to wash the walls of the heater closet under the staircase. I shut off the water and spent half the morning drying out the floor of the closet and trying to get a plumber out. The plumbing company I usually use can’t get here until Friday. My second call was to a local company who initially installed the heaters and tank and they couldn’t get here until next week. My call to a third company that I’ve used in the past was the charm because a plumber should finally be here within the next two hours.

Extremely sorry to hear this. My house is old, and the geniuses that built this decided to install the water heater in the attic, of all places. I had a leak once in my old water heater & it was a real mess.

The subsequent water heater I got has a safety feature installed in this so that if the water heater leaks even slightly, the entire system will automatically turn itself off. It was more expensive to buy this with the feature than without this, but well worth it.

I.e., if you ever plan to get a new water heater I would definitely ask them if this type of feature is available.

 

[TJPC]

Here in Ontario, our medical system was all backed up due to COVID. Just before, it struck 2 years ago, I was told that I was put on the list for a knee replacement.

I placidly bided my time knowing that transplant and cancer patients needed to go first of course. Meanwhile it became increasingly painful to go up stairs. I now have a handicap sign for my car, and use a cane.

I called my Doctor last month and was given the date of May 24 for the operation. I had to go to the hospital for one pre-op and was to receive phone calls for 3 others.

The first went well. I was told at the end that I should have been scheduled for blood work and a chest x ray. I went through the labyrinthine corridors of the hospital to those departments, but they never heard of me.

Today I was to get my phone pre-ops. They gave me the narrow window of 7:00 am to 3:00 am. I got up at the crack of dawn, and set aside an entire day. (My wife, not me, even had to take our car in for servicing for the first time in 42 years). — you guessed it, no phone calls. I finally called them, and a recording said “due to staff shortages they are calling tomorrow”! We are out all day.

When I called my doctor again, his nurse intimated strongly, that the pre-op people are idiots!

 

[Tony Bensley]

We're in the midst of preparing for a much needed multi phase/apartment building renovation that's scheduled to begin next week.

The single most painful part for us is due to long term safety concerns, all of the balconies, including ours, that was very much a sanity saver for our household throughout the pandemic WILL be coming down! Our building is over 60 years old, and they were already brought back up to code about 10 years ago. Sadly, another refurbishment for the balconies was simply found to be not feasible this time.

The other crappy aspect of this is our son will now have to find another place to keep the patio furniture he bought during the pandemic (So that we could all enjoy one safe outdoor environment!), and his plants for this year will have to go somewhere else!

 

[LeoA]

Common carrier railroads are interstate commerce and regulated by the federal government. Any state or local law where blocked crossing are concerned is just for show and doesn't hold up in court when contested.

There's often a very good reason for a stopped train. For instance a problem like an air hose coming disconnected between the cars will immediately send the train into emergency, stopping the train. No fix in that case except an old fashioned inspection by the conductor and engineer walking the length of the train to locate the issue (It never manages to be the car directly coupled to the locomotives...), fixing it (Which can entail walking back to the locomotive for tools and a spare hose), and then a wait while the air pumps charge the train line (Which if we're talking a 10,000' train or even longer, can take several minutes).

It's sadly just as likely today to be congestion or a lack of crews. In a move driven by Wall Street, major North American railroads are now managed by a concept known as "Precision Scheduled Railroading". It basically means investment, capacity, and so on are cut to the bone to drive down what's called the operating ratio (The % of each dollar of revenue that was spent to earn said dollar).

So there's no locomotive surplus when there's a traffic upswing which means there's no power to move the train. There's an inadequate number of crews due to the lack of training newcomers while experienced crews have been decreased due to attrition and buyouts. And the list goes on and on, worsening the problem as the system starts to clog up since there's simply no excess capacity to handle increased traffic (Your stopped train quite possibly couldn't enter a nearby freight yard due to lack of room to accommodate it).

The giant Class 1 railroads in the US are now attracting the attention of Congress and such as their service problems worsen after several years of being managed by PSR concepts. Hopefully the threat of regulation will help rebalance things where railroads can safely manage their system again in a way that accounts for all stakeholders and not just those that own a big slice of the stock (Federal regulation was strangling the industry decades ago and memories of that remain strong, so they'll do their best to avoid government intervention).

 

[jayembee]

Paramount Blu-rays.

Every. Freaking. Time. I spin one up, after the home video corporate logo, it comes up with the language selection screen. And Every. Freaking. Time. I have to select "English".

Of course, once that's done, and it continues loading, it comes up with the "You've played this disc before. Would you like to resume where you left off?"

If it can know where I left off on the disc from my previous viewing, why can't it remember what language option I chose the previous time?

 

[BobO'Link]

I recently watched the entire Mission Impossible TV series on BR (Paramount) - same issue on every disc - and I normally put in the next disc and go to the kitchen/bathroom while things load and *every* time I'd come back to that stupid language selection screen and *still* have to wait for the rest of the junk to load *plus* the animated part of the menu to run before I could start an episode. I discovered that sometimes the system would "remember" where I'd stopped the prior disc when inserting the next (basically starting the next in an episode) so would just start an episode playing, eject the disc, put in the next, and skip all that... about 50% of the time... the other 50% of the time that didn't work... totally random...

 

[bmasters9]

That I just discovered that with the new breed of flat-panel monitors, even if you have a screen saver running, that is the same as if you had the main image on screen all the time (I discovered this when my Windows 10 display suddenly developed black bars on the sides), and that the monitor must be shut off when not in use.

If that be the case, then why even have a screen saver!

 

[Malcolm R]

Ideally a screen saver changes the image on the entire screen regularly to avoid any kind of burn-in. If you're running a screen saver that has black bars on the sides, or any kind of static images, that would seem to defeat the purpose?

 

[BobO'Link]

Screen savers are only "good" if the image is constantly changing and roughly delivering the same brightness levels across the screen as it runs. If there's *any* static image/area, even those that move around the screen/rotate/etc., then you risk burn in.