Annoyances

This week, I wrote down everything that irritated me during the course of the day. This list was longer than I’d expected. Apparently, I’m a bit of a crankypants. Here goes:

• Radio commercials that include sirens or ringing phones. I’m trying to drive, not pull over for phantom ambulances or hitting my Bluetooth and shouting “Hello? Hello?” to dead air.
• Ditto commercials with shouting kids. I keep slamming my brakes and threatening to turn the car around right now, and I don’t even have children.
• People who post and share ridiculous stories without doing their research (it’s called Google, folks). Let me set the record straight on some of the COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY FALSE STORIES I saw posted on Facebook this week:
  • President Obama DID NOT apologize to Japan for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.
  • Kim Kardashian IS NOT replacing Tarji Henson as Cookie on Empire.
  • Bottled water being distributed in Flint, Michigan DOES NOT contain toxic levels of lead.

This doesn’t even cover the preposterous presidential campaign garbage that’s been circulating (to sum up: Hillary Clinton is not being indicted on racketeering charges, and Donald Trump’s son never said Hispanics fear his father will send them back to Asia). Here’s what I’m really starting to despise: people blindly sharing the most ridiculous nonsense without taking two seconds to verify if it’s accurate. (However, this rumor was happily true: William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, once said women are “far superior [to men] and always have been.”)

• People who think they can do my job because they’ve spotted the occasional typo in books, or because they’ve selected stories for an anthology. Let me make this clear: neither of these things in any way qualifies you as a copyeditor. To do my job, you need to be well versed in both the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook, and have a working knowledge of MLA and APA. By well versed, I mean you should be able to tell me, without looking it up, how each one feels about superscripting ordinals, and how they each lay out em dashes, and how each actually treats the word “copyeditor.” You should know which prefers which dictionary. You should be able to tell on sight when reading a piece which style guide was used. Most importantly, as a copyeditor, you know that you should question everything and never assume that you know why something is wrong. And if you’re going to claim that you’re a content editor, and don’t need to know about copyediting, you’re an idiot. That would be like saying “I took a CPR class. So essentially, I’m a paramedic.” You don’t know the first thing about how to do the job right.
• People who take pictures of their meals and post them online. Besides the fact that half the time what you think looks delicious often looks like something the cat ate, vomited back up, ate again, and pooped out, some of us are having issues right now with eating any kind of food, and I hate you.
• The movie Black Swan. I just don’t get the appeal.
• PMS jokes. They’re never funny. Period.

 In an effort to be fair, I also tried to keep a list of things that made me happy this week. Here's how far I got:

• ​  Coffee.

Black Swan: "Hated it!"