Pet peeves– we all have them. Most pet peeves just boil down to a “why would you ever walk around with your shoes untied” type of complaint. But some pet peeves transcend being annoying and become the worst things on planet Earth. I have some of those pet peeves.

My worst pet peeve is school questions– particularly math problems– that give their questions multiple parts. Picture this: you hear that your new math assignment only has ten problems. You get the assignment in hand, and it turns out that each of those ten problems has subsections that extend from part a through part e. You feel robbed. You were told there were only ten problems, but there are actually fifty. The writer of the assignment has misled everyone doing the work. Just write “questions 1-5 pertain to the graph above.” Do not write questions that have multiple parts. That is ridiculous, and there is no reason to write questions that way. 

Another large pet peeve of mine is lined paper with bad perforations. There are few things as satisfying in this world as tearing the spiral notebook connection off a lined piece of paper. However, the quality of the tear is entirely dependent on how good the perforations of the paper are. Bad perforations lead to the worst paper-tearing experience and cause a messy, ugly cut. And although I would not know, I feel like it is not too difficult to give your paper suitable perforations. Just produce the paper with small, consistent holes. But most companies just cannot seem to get it right. I have had notebooks that have some paper with wonderful perforations and other papers with practically zero perforations. How is that a problem that companies make? It is just embarrassing.

I also have issues with large companies that have bad websites. For example, Nintendo is the wealthiest company in Japan, but its websites are awful. Nintendo, for some convoluted reason, splits all of its services into four different websites: Nintendo Home, MyNintendo, Nintendo account, and Nintendo Store. And all of these websites have infamously bad servers. Last month, there was a limited release for some Mario 35th anniversary pins on Nintendo’s website, but they were incredibly difficult to order because the servers kept crashing. A few thousand people went to the Nintendo Store website, and the servers just could not handle it. Nintendo’s bad servers are usually a nonissue, but they are still pretty inexcusable. And there are other examples. For instance, MIT is a university that specializes in technology science. But its website is not a secure URL. Actually, why? It makes no sense, and it is not that difficult for them to fix. The website is just lazy.

These things all bother me a lot. I am guaranteed to think about each of them at least once a week. It irks me to no end, and I need all of these things to stop. All of my issues stem from the fact that none of them should be that difficult to resolve. I am just saying that anyone responsible for these pet peeves should really get their act together, or I will not support their antics. And let’s be real. How will they survive without me?