The pet peeve thread

[oblong]

web based email clients that try to make your inbox smarter.  I quit using gmail for that reason.  Yahoo just forced their upgraded client to me after resisting.  I don't want all these colors and icons and whatever.  Just give me everything in one spot and make it easy for me to delete them.  Quit trying to categorize them.  It's just yahoo.  I'm not working on anything.  All I want is that one message I came in there for and let me get rid of all the crap. 

I swear they make it harder for you to select the message to delete and try to trick you into opening it first.  "No, you have to click here, in this very precise location to select it.  Otherwise we're opning it for you to see the next ad we threw on the page"

[Dan Gilmore]

Right, people justify their jobs by coming up with new features nobody asked for. And then do it again. Bells, whistles. 

[Deleterious]

There is an option in gmail to turn that off.  

I think it's settings->inbox->categories 

Just uncheck all the subcategories then everything should go in the primary inbox only.  

Dumb that you have to do it but it might be easier than changing email services.  

[oblong]

I'll check that out, thanks.  I use my Yahoo for real stuff, I got that a long long time ago after the first time I switched internet providers and realized I could no longer use @comcast.net.  I used gmail for registrations and all of that kind of thing and buying/selling tickets.  

[gehringer_2]

  On 3/7/2025 at 4:24 PM, oblong said:

web based email clients that try to make your inbox smarter.  I quit using gmail for that reason.  Yahoo just forced their upgraded client to me after resisting.  I don't want all these colors and icons and whatever.  Just give me everything in one spot and make it easy for me to delete them.  Quit trying to categorize them.  It's just yahoo.  I'm not working on anything.  All I want is that one message I came in there for and let me get rid of all the crap. 

I swear they make it harder for you to select the message to delete and try to trick you into opening it first.  "No, you have to click here, in this very precise location to select it.  Otherwise we're opning it for you to see the next ad we threw on the page"

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I use gmail but with a third party mail app (Thunderbird) on my computers so I haven't been affected there, but but the presorting did come through on the iphone mail client and I had to turn it all off there. 

[oblong]

We have father of the bride on.  I’m 51. My wife is 52. We looked up the ages of the parents in this movie. Keaton and Martin are 45 when they filed this.  The other parents were 49.  

[casimir]

  On 3/9/2025 at 4:15 PM, oblong said:

We have father of the bride on.  I’m 51. My wife is 52. We looked up the ages of the parents in this movie. Keaton and Martin are 45 when they filed this.  The other parents were 49.  

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That’s awesome.  My wife was watching TV today when that popped on.

I’m the same age as you guys.  I don’t recall seeing this movie, but I know I watched a bit of Father of the Bride 2 with my wife a month or so ago.  So, I guess they were a bit older then.  But the age thing does kind of trip me up every once a while.  The guy that works for me is about the same age I was when I started at our place of employment.  He was in high school after I started working there.  Things like that.

[casimir]

While we’re talking age, I hate the word “kiddos”.

[LaceyLou]

  On 3/9/2025 at 4:15 PM, oblong said:

We have father of the bride on.  I’m 51. My wife is 52. We looked up the ages of the parents in this movie. Keaton and Martin are 45 when they filed this.  The other parents were 49.  

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The ages of some of the cast of the 1950 version were pretty out there... IIRC the mother of the bride actress was only 10 years older than the guy who played the groom.

[oblong]

  On 3/9/2025 at 8:29 PM, casimir said:

That’s awesome.  My wife was watching TV today when that popped on.

I’m the same age as you guys.  I don’t recall seeing this movie, but I know I watched a bit of Father of the Bride 2 with my wife a month or so ago.  So, I guess they were a bit older then.  But the age thing does kind of trip me up every once a while.  The guy that works for me is about the same age I was when I started at our place of employment.  He was in high school after I started working there.  Things like that.

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They looked like grandparents.  Its funny. I have peers with grandkids and peers with 4th graders.  

[Motor City Sonics]

I have a big pet peeve that I think many of you would agree with

Anytime someone becomes popular now - they are everywhere to the point where it's completely annoying. 

I don't need to see anymore Kelce brothers or Post Malone.     Cereal box and Oreos.     What do the Post Malone Oreos taste like, caramel and cigarettes?       

Just go away and go count your money, but give us some ****ing peace.  

[oblong]

I began to meticulously track my expsenses this year and already have become annoyed how institutions process transactions.  I yelled at my wife for spending too much on Starbucks but I realized depending on which day of the week she reloads her card, it will show up multiple times, then resolve itself.  You'll reload it on one day, it shows up immediately, then a few days later the same transaction shows up again with a different date, then that other transaction goes away after a period of time.   I had to spend a probably 15 minutes yesterday making sure I didn't get it wrong.  I had 3 transactions logged for every 2 legit.  It's the same amount as she reloads it at work and she and a work partner take turns buying for each other so she couldn't remember. 

It's not critical as I am not doing any kind of audit and it doesn't really matter other than me being right or wrong when I try to yell at my wife 🙂

 

  

[LaceyLou]

In your defense.... it's pretty easy to overspend at Starbucks. 

[chasfh]

  On 3/7/2025 at 4:24 PM, oblong said:

web based email clients that try to make your inbox smarter.  I quit using gmail for that reason.  Yahoo just forced their upgraded client to me after resisting.  I don't want all these colors and icons and whatever.  Just give me everything in one spot and make it easy for me to delete them.  Quit trying to categorize them.  It's just yahoo.  I'm not working on anything.  All I want is that one message I came in there for and let me get rid of all the crap. 

I swear they make it harder for you to select the message to delete and try to trick you into opening it first.  "No, you have to click here, in this very precise location to select it.  Otherwise we're opning it for you to see the next ad we threw on the page"

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Download Outlook from the Microsoft Store and sync all your Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts to it. I had eight separate Gmail accounts I use for different purposes coming into a single Inbox. It’s so convenient once you get it working. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

[chasfh]

  On 3/9/2025 at 8:56 PM, casimir said:

While we’re talking age, I hate the word “kiddos”.

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I will call people “kiddo” sometimes, just to mix things up a little, but I would refer to children as “kiddos”, which sounds super clunky to my ears.

[gehringer_2]

  On 3/16/2025 at 10:08 PM, chasfh said:

Download Outlook from the Microsoft Store and sync all your Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts to it. I had eight separate Gmail accounts I use for different purposes coming into a single Inbox. It’s so convenient once you get it working. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

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I keep trying to get the SO off google web mail, but she's too change averse even though she's constantly complaining about it to me. I use thunderbird as it goes mutiplatform (and multi-account) so well and I'm on Linux 90% of the time  - but I think any standalone mail client has to be better than web mail -even if it's from MS.

Edited March 16 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

  On 3/16/2025 at 11:17 PM, gehringer_2 said:

I keep trying to get the SO off google web mail, but she's too change averse even though she's constantly complaining about it to me. I use thunderbird as it goes mutiplatform (and multi-account) so well and I'm on Linux 90% of the time  - but I think any standalone mail client has to be better than web mail -even if it's from MS.

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Set it up for her without her knowing, then show it to her. If she still rejects it, then eh, you did what you could to make things easy on her.

I got my wife off the web and onto Outlook by setting up three emails addresses for her on it, including our shared email address for house stuff.

[LaceyLou]

I suppose this is more amusing than it is a pet peeve....

I was bored, and decided to do a search for 'walkable small towns in the US."

The first option I saw? New York.

As much as I love NY and how walkable it is, I'm gonna go ahead and say that it's not small.

[chasfh]

This is more a pet peeve than it is amusing: I'm wondering whether Amazon is starting to lose it.

Three recent incidents:

1. I ordered two boxes of Gimme Seaweed Snacks in late February. When I opened the bag, they looked and tasted musty, as though they sat in a warehouse for a year. Which they probably did: they were expired by a few weeks by the time I'd gotten them. Amazon did do a "one-time courtesy" (or something) refund of the product on the spot.
2. There is an inexpensive disposable personal care product I buy on a regular basis, and I always used to just go to my Buy Again page to find it and order it. Except last week: the product was no longer listed, not only on my Buy Again page, but not even in my order history at all, and I did an exhaustive search for at least fifteen minutes looking for it. After all, how could I misplace that? It always was where it was, for a couple of years at least. Until it wasn't, and as of today, still isn't. I had to buy a different product from the same company, which is now in my Buy Again—for the moment.
3. And now, this week, I learned from Amazon themselves that a food product I ordered back on March 4 "may be lost". No, seriously. See screenshot below. (Yes, it's another brand of seaweed snacks. I like seaweed snacks. So sue me.) When you click on "return or replace items", you learn that this particular item can be neither returned nor replaced. Also, there is no easily-findable link on the Amazon page for customer service or chat. I had to Google "Amazon chat support" to get to it. And I cycled through three different reps (i.e., Sachin had a technical issue. Please wait while we transfer you to a new associate) trying to get a refund, which, they ended up saying they could not issue because it's a third-party seller, so they apparently reached out to them on my behalf to contact me. We'll see where this goes.

I do think Amazon is starting to lose it, by which I mean, the "it" of customer care that is emblematic of a company that operates in a competitive marketplace where they fear losing your business.

Welcome to your brave new world: canis caninam non est, so, caveat emptor.

Edited Tuesday at 08:25 PM by chasfh

[LaceyLou]

One time I had an order that was apparently lost, so I clicked on 'leave seller feedback' and left a comment about the (nonexistent) delivery process. It ended up getting a comment 'this is not feedback about the seller, it's for the delivery service' but all of a sudden my product was found, and delivered the next day.

Keep in mind that this could be a coincidence, and that I can't say for sure if my 'feedback' lit a fire under anybody.

[gehringer_2]

Interesting that you are having these issues. My experience has been of an increase in lost packages in the last couple of weeks. An associate of mine had a package criss-cross the country twice and then finally arrive too late for a project we were working on, and I just had an order of my own get lost. And again - strange complexity to get it replaced. There were three items in the order, the associate could only re-order one, I had to accept a refund and place another order for the other two items - what sense does that make? Then the weirdest thing was that the associate went through a long struggle with the fact that the order had been sent to my local pick-up box, he finally said he could not route the one item he could replace there, it had to be to my home. OK fine. Next day the replaced item showed up - at the pickup box! I kid you not.

So yeah - I wouldn't disagree the ship seems to be taking on some water.

[chasfh]

  On 3/25/2025 at 8:32 PM, gehringer_2 said:

Interesting that you are having these issues. My experience has been of an increase in lost packages in the last couple of weeks. An associate of mine had a package criss-cross the country twice and then finally arrive too late for a project we were working on, and I just had an order of my own get lost. And again - strange complexity to get it replaced. There were three items in the order, the associate could only re-order one, I had to accept a refund and place another order for the other two items - what sense does that make? Then the weirdest thing was that the associate went through a long struggle with the fact that the order had been sent to my local pick-up box, he finally said he could not route the one item he could replace there, it had to be to my home. OK fine. Next day the replaced item showed up - at the pickup box! I kid you not.

So yeah - I wouldn't disagree the ship seems to be taking on some water.

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Now that they are a de facto monopoly, Amazon has no incentive to fix it, improve it, or even keep it from getting worse.

[gehringer_2]

  On 3/27/2025 at 2:23 PM, chasfh said:

Now that they are a de facto monopoly, Amazon has no incentive to fix it, improve it, or even keep it from getting worse.

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Luck for us, e-tail retail is not like 2 nanometer semiconductor manufacture;  barriers to entry for e-commerce is pretty low. If Amazon starts faltering in a major way, they will have plenty of competition nipping at their heals.

[casimir]

  On 3/21/2025 at 4:23 PM, LaceyLou said:

I suppose this is more amusing than it is a pet peeve....

I was bored, and decided to do a search for 'walkable small towns in the US."

The first option I saw? New York.

As much as I love NY and how walkable it is, I'm gonna go ahead and say that it's not small.

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A few summers ago, the family went to Niagara Falls and Toronto.  While we were in Niagara Falls, we took a trek up to Niagara on the Lake, which is right on Lake Ontario where the Niagara River flows into it, right across the border from New York State (I forget that town’s name).  It’s a little touristy, but there’s a pretty nice walkable Main Street downtown area with small shops, a nice sized common park area, horse carriage rides, small town stuff like that.  And the town is walkable with lots of nice houses.  Lots of grape vineyards along the way from the Falls to the Lake.

The weather was clear enough where we could see across the lake and make out silhouettes of the Toronto skyline.  I think we were told that was around 30 miles across the lake?  I don’t know.  Maybe someone was yanking our chain a little on the distance.  But it took somewheres around an hour from the Falls to downtown Toronto when we made that drive.

[Deleterious]

Retail is usually a loss-leader for Amazon.  I bet they would love a competitor to step up and steal some business.  They would also help you get started.  Use their site, then their warehouses to store the items, trucks/planes/ships to move it, last-mile delivery.  All for a small fee.

AWS is currently their big profit maker.