We are almost at the end of the NCAA basketball season. Spartans fans saw their team make it all the way to the Final Four, where they came up short against the Duke dynasty. It’s been bracket bonanza everywhere, with office pools, hometown supporters and just inveterate gamblers taking part.
We at K2M have our brackets of winners and losers. We call it: what annoys us most. Just so we’re not too personal, we decided not to include how our spouses, parents, partners, children, and siblings annoy us. That would take up way too much room. No, we focused on the Elite Eight Extra Irritating Elements of our Existence, those aspects of modern life that just plain bug us.
Here they are:
Bracket #1: Home phone spam vs. Email spam
Winner of most annoying: Home phone spam
Our email spam is the lowest it has ever been actually. We are rarely hearing from Nigerian princes and less people than ever think we need erectile dysfunction medication.
The home phone, however, seems to be used exclusively by political organizations and occasional telemarketers. Our real friends text or call on our mobile. We occasionally consider getting rid of the home phone and are only dissuaded when the cable and internet providers tell us there is no financial reason to do so (they’ll just raise the internet rate if we get rid of the phone). So, now we are getting lots of calls about Michigan roads.
Bracket #2: Inaccurate traffic report on AM vs. mispronunciation of local roads on Sirius traffic and weather
Winner of most annoying: inaccurate AM traffic reporting
We must acknowledge that traffic reporting is not the most stimulating to participate in or to hear, but when you’re hitting local roads, you need to know about 696, 75, 96, 94 and the Lodge plus those local roads. It seems that every time we get on the road, first we encounter a traffic snarl and then later it shows up on the AM reports. Sirius seems to get the news a touch earlier, but they really don’t know how to pronounce “Gratiot” at all. And “Lahser” gives them some trouble, too.
Bracket #3: Working from home vs. working from the office.
Winner of most annoying: working from home
Working from home allows us to wear what we want, eat our own leftovers, multitask, feel comfortable and that’s great. But those same things also really do distract us. If there’s no kid’s laundry to do at the office, we will do it when we come home. Now, when we go to the office and stuff doesn’t work (internet, wifi, the fax machine, or the copy machine), we are plenty motivated to head right back home. If we want to work at an inefficient place, we know where to find it. We live in it.
Bracket #4: Registering our kids online or with written forms.
Winner: registering using written forms.
Let us say that there are super-cumbersome registration forms for our kids: any financial aid form seems to have been written and HTML coded by a mean spirited accountant of the worst order. This includes the FAFSA, by the way. Registering for summer camps runs the gamut from somewhat easy, to “oh my God, please just take my kids off my hands, why is this still going on?”. We also see our kids in the college admissions world registering for the ACT and SAT (which takes at least 30 minutes and feels like it’s super important), and of course the Common App takes hours. But, filling out medical forms especially immunization records when you receive a perfectly decent computerized one from your pediatrician makes us want get extra meningitis shots for ourselves. And, we love that the names of the vaccinations on the “forms” are not the sames as what they are called on the immunization records. One will say chicken pox, another will say varicella, one will say tetanus, another will say Td.
Final Four:
Home phone spam vs. inaccurate AM traffic report
Winner: Home phone spam
Working from Home vs. Registering using written forms
Winner: Registering using written forms
Finals:
Home phone spam vs. Registering using written forms