Annoying Time-Wasters

There are all sorts of annoying things in life – people who cut in line, aggressive drivers, people talking on cell phones in public. This list is a specific subpart of that very large category. It focuses on the top ten things that both annoy and waste your time, or, more accurately, steal time away from you. These things steal time from your life that you would ordinarily have kept and used for, presumably, more fun and productive endeavors. Sit down and try to calculate how much time you estimate you have spent dealing with these annoyances.

Too Many Choices

Have you ever gone into a grocery store to buy, say, a box of Wheat Thins and been confronted with an entire wall of different varieties of Wheat Thins? You just want regular, old-fashioned Wheat Thins. But to find them, you must search your way through a dozen or more different types of Wheat Thins in the grocery store display. Big Wheat Thins (an oxymoron George Carlin would have loved), Artisan Cheese Wheat Thins, Ranch Wheat Thins, the list goes on and on. This takes time and becomes very frustrating. In fact, recent research has shown that, when confronted with too many different choices, grocery store shoppers tend to not buy the product at all out of sheer overload and frustration. Now, take the Wheat Thin choice overload model and apply it to most every other product you want to buy in a grocery store. You end up spending half a day shopping for groceries where before it took an hour – simply because you can’t find what you are looking for, or have to ponder too many choices.

Malware

An especially virulent form of modern time wasting is caused by various forms of computer malware that infect and slow down your computer, or slow down your interface with the computer (or both). Of course if we simply did not use computers, this extreme time waster would not be an issue for us. However, in our modern high tech lives, not using a computer is becoming more and more difficult. It is estimated that at least 60% of all home PC’s are infected with some form of malware. Many home PC’s are so infected as to render the machines almost unusable. Unknowing and not especially tech-literate home PC users waste untold millions of hours of time on slow, unresponsive malware-infested computers, and do not even know it. It is debatable which is worse – living with things that waste your time, unbeknownst to you, or living with things that waste your time, and of which you are painfully aware. Regardless, computer malware (not to mention the time spent installing anti-malware programs and time spent running and maintaining those computer security programs) is a huge waste of your time.

Microsoft Products

“Do you want to send this error message”? “Sorry but Windows needs to shut down”. How many times were you moving along through your PC and all of a sudden one of these annoying messages popped up on the screen and you were cut off, stopped dead in your tracks and had to wait for your PC to reboot? If you are like most PC users, it is a lot of wasted time. And most hated of all is the dreaded “blue screen of death” which would suddenly appear with no warning or error message at all – just a blank blue screen staring back at you. And, of course, how much time have you wasted redoing the content that was lost when Microsoft products decide to just shut down or lock up on you?
This is not meant to be a specific criticism of Microsoft, all computer programs, operating systems and hardware have problems, and can lock up or shut down or lose data for unexpected reasons. However – because Microsoft has the lion’s share of the PC and software market, they account for the vast majority of the time we waste because of computer software and hardware malfunctions. And, of course, they were responsible for the travesty that was Windows 98, which single-handedly wasted millions of hours of human time until Windows XP was released.

Red Lights

Red lights are a common device that have been around almost as long as the automobile, yet red lights are a huge time waster. Why? Because there are other options to control traffic flow at many intersections – namely, the traffic circle or roundabout. A roundabout is a type of circular junction in which road traffic must travel in one direction around a central island. Signs usually direct traffic entering the circle to slow down and give the right of way to drivers already in the circle. These junctions are sometimes called modern roundabouts in order to emphasize the distinction from older circular junction types, which had different design characteristics and rules of operation. Older designs, called traffic circles or rotaries, are typically larger, operate at higher speeds, and often give priority to entering traffic.
In countries where people drive on the right, the traffic flow around the central island of a roundabout is counterclockwise. In countries where people drive on the left, the traffic flow is clockwise. Statistically, roundabouts are safer for drivers and pedestrians than both traffic circles and traditional intersections. Because low speeds are required for traffic entering roundabouts they are not designed for high-speed motorways.
The first modern roundabout in the United States was constructed in Summerlin, Nevada, in 1990, and roundabouts have since become increasingly common in North America.

Tamper Resistant Packaging

Tamper-resistant devices or features are common on modern packages. There are also tamper-evident packaging methods, which make it noticeable that a product has been tampered with or opened. Whether they are seals, caps, wrappings, twist-off devices, hooks, anchors, twist-ties, or the dreaded hard-plastic clamshell packaging used on such things as children’s toys, all manner of tamper-resistant and tamper-evident packaging wastes hundreds of hours in an average lifetime as you pry, cut, twist, shear, punch and otherwise manipulate the packaging to get at what you want.
Tamper-resistant packaging as we now know it is a relatively new invention, which dates back to the Chicago Tylenol murders in the autumn of 1982. Seven people died after taking pain-relief capsules that had been poisoned. The Tylenol poisonings took place when Extra-Strength Tylenol medicine capsules were maliciously laced with potassium cyanide. The incident led to reforms in the packaging of over-the-counter substances, and to federal anti-tampering laws. The case remains unsolved and no suspects have been charged. However, the incident did inspire the pharmaceutical, food and consumer product industries to develop tamper-resistant packaging, such as induction seals and improved quality control methods. Moreover, product tampering was made a federal crime.

Blow-in Cards

How much time does the average person waste picking off the floor, and throwing away, the magazine subscription cards that fall out when you open the magazine? These annoyances are meant to fall out into your lap, but this assumes the reader is sitting down when they open the magazine, and also assumes it will land in your lap, not on the floor, or be blown away by the wind or a fan. Invariably, these little cards end up not in your lap or hand, but everywhere you don’t want them – under the couch, in between the seat cushions, on the kitchen floor, blowing down the driveway as you get the mail. These cards are typically 3’x5” in size and are called “blow-in” cards, because in the magazine manufacturing process these cards are typically blown into the magazine, between the pages, one at a time. Of course, sometimes the machines accidentally blow in more than one card, so your issue of Sports Illustrated barfs nine of these cards onto the floor when you open it. Some cards are called “bind-in” cards and these are OK, they are bound into the magazine and do not fall out (typically they have perforated edges and can be torn out by the reader). It is the blow-in cards that are so annoying and waste your time when you have to chase one down the street or pick it up and throw it into the trash.