Seemingly trivial things that annoy you

TheBigBean

My flight has been changed. It now takes off 3 hours earlier and is scheduled to land at the same time as before. Recent flights have landed a bit earlier, but I really didn't need three more day time hours to entertain the kids

Pross

There’s an article that Rick would love on Morning Live (yes, I’m watching it as I’m on holiday in a caravan with limited choices until we go out). They are getting people to try living on state pension of £185 (some had top ups). It’s utterly pointless though as the people are still living their current lives. It also didn’t explain whether there was an assumption they would be paying mortgage / rent. I guess you can’t expect hard hitting articles on a programme like this.

pangolin

Trying to leave a vaguely sensible stopping distance between you and the car in the front on the motorway and having a constant stream of people pull into it.

Half of those people not bothering the indicate first.

Many of them making no effort to actually speed up as they do so, so you have to brake.

rick_chasey

Pross said:

There’s an article that Rick would love on Morning Live (yes, I’m watching it as I’m on holiday in a caravan with limited choices until we go out). They are getting people to try living on state pension of £185 (some had top ups). It’s utterly pointless though as the people are still living their current lives. It also didn’t explain whether there was an assumption they would be paying mortgage / rent. I guess you can’t expect hard hitting articles on a programme like this.

Oh those things are so annoying aren't they.

"yikes, it turns out my 6 litre turbocharged high performance SUV uses 80% of the weekly state pension in a week, I am shook. The rest will be spent heating my 8 bedroom mansion, I don't know how these poor pensioners do it"

No sh!t sherlock.

rick_chasey

When oh when oh when will I have a day, a single day, of commuting without train delays. Has been months.

briantrumpet

Buying four SNCF tickets to take our bikes to Gap to ride back yesterday, and being told by the guard that they only had space for one, so the lady who was at the station before us was the lucky one. You can't reserve bike spaces at all. I've now got to try to get a refund from Trainline.

We went for a walk instead, which was quite nice, and cheered us up.

rick_chasey

When Brits try to mock Americans for referring to petrol as gas, by saying "petrol is a liquid not a gas" as if they can't work out that gas is short for gasoline which is the proper name for the product.

First.Aspect

.

rick_chasey said:

When Brits try to mock Americans for referring to petrol as gas, by saying "petrol is a liquid not a gas" as if they can't work out that gas is short for gasoline which is the proper name for the product.

What about aluminum and fanny? Is it okay to mock those?

rick_chasey

Plenty of ammunition to mock Americans (when it's not being used to gun down their own school children), so might as well do it properly.

pangolin

rick_chasey said:

Plenty of ammunition to mock Americans (when it's not being used to gun down their own school children), so might as well do it properly.

If the end result is the same, why get bogged down in the detail of how people get there?

kingstongraham

When you have two words for the same thing, how is one of them the proper one? And abbreviating so it makes a completely different word that already means something else is just "singers" all over again.

rick_chasey

If you're working on the oil crack you're referring to it as gasoline, not petrol.

TheBigBean

Etymology

"Gasoline" is an American word that denotes fuel for automobiles. The term is thought to have been influenced by the trademark "Cazeline" or "Gazeline", named after the surname of British publisher, coffee merchant, and social campaigner John Cassell. On 27 November 1862, Cassell placed an advertisement in The Times of London:

The Patent Cazeline Oil, safe, economical, and brilliant [...] possesses all the requisites which have so long been desired as a means of powerful artificial light.[11]

This is the earliest occurrence of the word to have been found. Cassell discovered that a shopkeeper in Dublin named Samuel Boyd was selling counterfeit cazeline and wrote to him to ask him to stop. Boyd did not reply and changed every 'C' into a 'G', thus coining the word "gazeline".[12] The Oxford English Dictionary dates its first recorded use to 1863 when it was spelled "gasolene". The term "gasoline" was first used in North America in 1864.[13]

In most Commonwealth countries (except Canada), the product is called "petrol", rather than "gasoline". The word petroleum, originally used to refer to various types of mineral oils and literally meaning "rock oil", comes from Medieval Latin petroleum (petra, "rock", and oleum, "oil").[14][15] "Petrol" was used as a product name in about 1870, as the name of a refined mineral oil product sold by British wholesaler Carless, Capel & Leonard, which marketed it as a solvent.[16]When the product later found a new use as a motor fuel, Frederick Simms, an associate of Gottlieb Daimler, suggested to John Leonard, the owner of Carless, that they register the trademark "Petrol",[17] but by that time the word was already in general use, possibly inspired by the French pétrole,[18] and the registration was not allowed because the word was a general descriptor; Carless was still able to defend its use of "Petrol" as a product name due to their having sold it under that name for many years by then. Carless registered a number of alternative names for the product, but "petrol" nonetheless became the common term for the fuel in the British Commonwealth.[19][20]

British refiners originally used "motor spirit" as a generic name for the automotive fuel and "aviation spirit" for aviation gasoline. When Carless was denied a trademark on "petrol" in the 1930s, its competitors switched to the more popular name "petrol". However, "motor spirit" had already made its way into laws and regulations, so the term remains in use as a formal name for petrol.[21][22] The term is used most widely in Nigeria, where the largest petroleum companies call their product "premium motor spirit".[23] Although "petrol" has made inroads into Nigerian English, "premium motor spirit" remains the formal name that is used in scientific publications, government reports, and newspapers.[24]

The use of the word gasoline instead of petrol is uncommon outside North America,[25] although gasolina is used in Spanish and Portuguese.

In many languages, the name of the product is derived from benzene, such as Benzin in Persian and German or benzina in Italian; but in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, the colloquial name nafta is derived from that of the chemical naphtha.[26]

Some languages, like French and Italian, use the respective words for gasoline to indicate diesel fuel.

focuszing723

Ah, good stuff. I like hearing how things/terms evolve over time.

pinno

And now I can put them yanks straight and tell 'em that 'Gasoline' originated in Blighty.

One for the irony thread.

rick_chasey

It’s Tuesday, so that can only mean:

rick_chasey

……aaaand cancelled on the way home

pinno

rick_chasey said:

……aaaand cancelled on the way home

Find a bench in Hyde park.

Stevo_666

pinno said:

rick_chasey said:

……aaaand cancelled on the way home

Find a bench in Hyde park.

It'll save a bit on tomorrow's commute as well.

surrey_commuter

Stevo_666 said:

pinno said:

rick_chasey said:

……aaaand cancelled on the way home

Find a bench in Hyde park.

It'll save a bit on tomorrow's commute as well.

As it is only twice a week it must bring cycling into the mix

pinno

Twice a month maybe. At a push.

shirley_basso

I did it once a week while I still worked in London. Southbound on Tuesday, north on Weds or Thurs.

Stevo_666

surrey_commuter said:

Stevo_666 said:

pinno said:

rick_chasey said:

……aaaand cancelled on the way home

Find a bench in Hyde park.

It'll save a bit on tomorrow's commute as well.

As it is only twice a week it must bring cycling into the mix

You'd hope so, as he is an expert in the field of road cycling, amongst other things.

rick_chasey

Stevo_666 said:

, as he is an expert in the field of road cycling, amongst other things.

Glad we're agreed on something

Stevo_666

rick_chasey said:

Stevo_666 said:

, as he is an expert in the field of road cycling, amongst other things.

Glad we're agreed on something

We can add that to your list - macroeconomics, virology, military strategy, politics, energy strategy - to name but a few

rick_chasey

A modern day renaissance man, eh?

focuszing723

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSn8y1CGapQ
Cakeism MO.

Pross

I know people have previously commented many times about parents dropping kids off at school. This doesn't bother me as much as most of those are a slight diversion from their own drive to work at most. However, this morning I was parked up in a public car park near a local school and leaving just as kids were starting to arrive. I had a car come into the car park as I was trying to leave my space that just used the car park to turn around in and as I followed it out of the car park it then stopped in the middle of the road holding up traffic whilst off-loading four kids. Why not just do that in the car park where they could have pulled in out of the way? It would have been maybe a 20-30m extra walk for the kids.

pblakeney

Walk?
Don't be silly. 😉

Pross

pblakeney said:

Walk?
Don't be silly. 😉

I know, it would have been maybe 100m to the school gates instead of the 70-80m from where it was deemed acceptable to block the road to drop them off.