Things that annoy you...

One of my pet peeves is the phrase “British-born”, which is often used in America to describe someone living here, but born in Britain. Drives me nuts as it makes no sense whatsoever. I was born in Britain so I’m obviously British. I’ve lived in America more than half my life & even though I have dual citizenship I am still British. (I would have to renounce my citizenship if I no longer wanted to be British.)

British-born gives the impression that one has left one’s British nationality on the runway at Heathrow as one zooms off to a foreign country.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Capitalistic Christmas...Oh how I long to get off the ridiculous gift buying/receiving merry go around that doesn't make anyone I know happy...except for small kids.

Took the day off for Boxing day matches, almost was a waste going down to Newcastle within 20 mins.

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My Favorite Films

Netflix is annoying. They keep fixing things that don’t need fixing.

115 movies in my dvd Q & not a single one of them available for streaming. Just re-enrolled in the streaming plan, but am going to cancel right now.

Worst thing is before there was a little “play” symbol that showed if a dvd movie could be streamed. That’s gone now & one has to click several times to find out if the movie can be streamed.

If you wanted to delete a movie from the Q, it would tell you where in the Q the movie is. Nope, that’s gone too.

The use of “I don’t know nothing” - a double negative - is more & more prevalent these days. It might even become legit one of these days. Horrible English.

The A-Hole who decided to park his car on my street before dawn today with a faulty car alarm. He doesn’t live on my street, but decided to leave his car in a driveway adjacent to an apartment building across the street from my house. Around 3 or 4 a.m., his alarm starts going off literally every 5 minutes. And you can’t imagine how loud it was. Bore it until around 5 a.m. when I got up, went out on the street in the rain in my pajamas to see where the racket was coming from. Wrote down his registration & went back to call the police. A female officer came fairly quickly & I went out to talk to her. She said cops can’t tow a car from private property, but she left messages for the apartment manager to get the car towed. She told me the car owner is registered with an address on the other side of town. At 8 a.m. I had to leave my house for the day & alarm was still going, but when I got home around 1 p.m. the car was gone. I spoke to the apartment manager & he told me the car was towed. He said the towing company makes rounds every night to check on unknown vehicles, but the car wasn’t there when they did their last round. Apartment manager was very nice & it’s good to have gotten his name & made contact with him should this happen again.

Ugh, bad day & now it’s pissing down with rain accompanied by thunder & lightning.

It's like my issue with everyone starting off every sentence with "So" (as if they'd been interrupted and resumed speaking... or they were in the middle of presenting a hypothesis and building to a conclusion: using "so" as "thus" or "therefore".)

What gets me is the Jeopardy Teacher's Tournament - these are teachers, and to hear about 90% of them start off their interview commentary with "So" - it's just annoying because it sounds rude (as if your answer to any question is belligerent because you had to say "So... AS I WAS SAYING before being so rudely interrupted...")

They all sound like Alex Trebek was rude enough to interrupt them!

So.....'sew buttons'. You ever hear that one?

You reap what you sow.

Yeah that's true. But when someone starts off saying: Soooo, I say 'sew buttons'! Mostly I don't, but on rare occasions I do.

When I was in college, the phrase "Sew buttons" was usually followed by "You can't glue them on".


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If I answer a game thread correctly, just skip my turn and continue with the game.
OPEN FLOOR.

This one reminded me of a recent issue - in my current living situation I have to park on the street. Parking nearby has become a commodity as people vie for spots near their residences (part of this is due to the fact that so many homes in the area have converted from single-family to double, as so many homeowners rent out their 2nd floors).

Anyway, things weren't so bad as people were finding spots... until some guy with a 20 foot flat bed truck (the kind used for towing cars) began parking on the street all the locals park on. This truck takes up about 4 parking spaces, and if placed near a driveway, basically takes half the block on one side.

I don't know if he's breaking any laws or not, but it just seems wrong to suddenly monopolize a residential area with a super long vehicle where people have to rely on street parking.

Last I heard, our neighbor got into a shouting match with the flat bed guy - I don't know if it had any resolution.

Ha I hadn't heard that before.

You might want to check with the police about the truck. Some areas have local laws about parking a commercial vehicle on a residential street.

I really hate that our office technically shuts down for the holidays but we're not allowed to inform our clients. Without fail, I spend half my holiday and vacation time off working remotely.

As you know I had a Netflix DVD plan for many years. At one time I must have had nearly a 100 movies in my queue that weren't actually available at Netflix. Talk about false advertising. Then when I cancelled, they kept charging the credit card!

Update: the credit card company reimbursed us for the fraudulent Netflix charges, which was a relief.

Now guess what? For Christmas I get a $30 Netflix gift card for a present. It says no credit card necessary. BUT you do have to create a Netflix account, which I'm betting takes a credit card to do. And I'm not giving Netflix another credit card!

Excellent advice.

When I needed a credit card for a phone app, I went to Walmart and got their BlueBird credit card. It's basically an AmEx card, but you don't have to register it to use it, unless you want to continue to use it by adding more money after the initial balance runs out. It cost me $5 for the card, and I only put the amount that I needed on the card, and used it the one time I needed it. That way, if anyone hacked the account or tried to charge it again, there was no more money for them to get because it doesn't attach to any bank accounts or other credit cards.

That's a great idea and I didn't know about that. Thanks

There are a bunch of different pre-paid credit cards available at Walmart and other stores. I chose the Bluebird card because it was recommended to me by a friend who's used it before, and he never had any problems with it, and because it seems to be a Walmart exclusive card.

I didn't register my card because I only used it the one time that I needed it. My friend registered his card, and he uses it whenever he needs to add a credit card to any phone apps. If you register it, you can add money to it at any Walmart location. It will still be limited to only the amount of money that is on the card, as long as you don't add any bank account info to it.

You can read more about it here:

https://www.bluebird.com/