Pet Peeves

Bill Drew posted a rant yesterday about Out of Office messages, which made me laugh (in sympathy). While I understand why people use out of office auto-replies, I do admit to finding them annoying when sent to listservs. Of course, I try and get over my annoyance because I doubt the problem will ever go away and I make lots of mistakes too. I even find myself chuckling at certain times. On one of the listservs to which I subscribe, there is one person who always sets an out of office auto reply and (as far as I can tell) never sets the listserv option to nomail. I keep a mental calendar of when this person is “out of the office.” I often wonder if the person has gone away somewhere fascinating. For me, I never use the out of office auto-reply option - mostly because I can’t even remember how many listservs I subscribe to so there isn’t any way that I can set them to nomail.

In honor of pet peeves, I thought I add some of mine:

• Unsubscribe messages sent to a listserv and the subsequent heated debate about it. What I find comical in this situation is when there is a heated debate about someone’s unsubscribe message that is immediately followed by at least one other unsubscribe command. Part of me thinks that people do this on purpose to keep the love alive. I keep a mental tally of how long it takes for the subsequent unsubscribe email.
• Patrons taking data cables from computers. This tends to be the biggest reason why computers are out of order. Since patrons obviously need them, we try to supply them at the circulation desk - but they generally don’t ask. I now need to tie wrap everything to discourage this habit of removing the cables. I try and think of this as a game that we play. Since I don’t necessarily like to win, this is a good strategy for me. On the positive side, this must mean laptop use is up.
• The fact that my husband doesn’t mind wearing two different socks. This can throw off my whole day and I can’t find anything funny about it (other than the fact that it is amusing and odd that it bothers me).