You Suck!

First of all, a message for anyone ...

...reading this site from weird browsers like Safari, Opera, or IE. You eccentric freaks you. Firefox is free so I have no idea what other excuses you might have for not using it.

...reading this site in 800x600? You suck too. Here's a suggestion: switch to your mobile phone 300x200, because you will have a better web experience.

Some people have pet peeves, things that get on their nerves, bug bears, or Room 101 candidates...

...Many people also consider their "phobias" (such as fingernails scraping on a blackboard) to be somehow a different class of experience...

I tend to see the world as a general avalanche of idiocy with these "annoyances" and "phobias" carried along as an ever increasing payload of less innocuous "cowpats from the Devil's own Satanic herd" which sap the will to live and cultivate one's primal murder frenzy urge.

In the spirit of "woosaa" I am gathering those things here, so, thus named and shamed, I may appreciate the remaining things in life that do not suck gigantic cock.

A List Of Things I Hate
(Updated Monthly!)

Bananas
Scottishness
Waking up
Writing thank-you letters
School and Exams
Oxford University
Anything too loud
White socks
Nail cutting with scissors
Everything about the ipod, iphone, zune, and kindle

(The above are the ones which cannot be tamed simply by naming them... the rest of the list simply induce acid saliva, squeaky teeth grinding, neck tightening, buttock spasms, gastic effervescence, eye twitching, etc.)

The increasingly popular pronunciation by American women of "too" as "tieew" and "you" as "yieeaw"
Companies that are so huge and corporatocratic that, even after hacking through layers of horrible flash on their sites, and struggling to find any "about us" page, you can spend half an hour reading their materials and STILL not have any idea what the company actually does. e.g. http://www.lifunggroup.com/ or, even worse, http://www.ogilvy.com/ - companies, in other words, that are so old-fashioned, arrogant, and huge that they have no need AND no interest in explaining what they do to any peons like us, and view their website as a sort of brochure "we, us, our" and not for speaking to customers.
People's jobs in corporatocracies (qv) where they burble on for a few minutes to try to explain what tf it is they do for a living, but leave one none the wiser
Antworks
Internet explorer calling a link a "shortcut"
Water births
Zero tolerance policies
Estate agents quoting rents per week in order to make them seem less extortionate
People typing * instead of x as in 4*4
Generostriction - when you are restricted from giving your opinion on something because of the generosity of someone, e.g. not complaining about food when someone paid the bill, having to like unwanted gifts, being nice to people because they travelled a long way etc
Chicken a la King
Mini wine bottles
Extra big wine bottles in shops which no one will ever buy
Wine with a plastic cork
Wine with a screw cap
Carry On films
Antimacassars on public transport
Net curtains
Communal gardens. Actually, communal anything.
Cricket sight screens
Dogs playing poker paintings
Children in playgrounds
Playgrounds
Comic Sans
Columnists or bloggers with smug picture of themselves dominating the article
Web-ignorant people referring to total results of a search result as if it has great significance, particularly when they say "returns 861,000,000 hits"
People writing ad[vertisement] as AD as if it is an acronym
People constantly using my name when speaking to me
People beginning sentences with "I'm going to be honest with you" or "I'm not going to lie to you"
People twittering or blog posting about how they don't have time for blog posting
USA only phone input boxes, who tf do they think they are
Vanessa Mae and any other attempt to make classical music "sexy"
Murder She Wrote
Thongs
Socks and sandals
Shorts worn with socks and shoes
Woody Woodpecker
Weak-strong post-feminist song lyrics e.g. "You're a big girl now"
Pointless twiddly vocalization in pop songs otherwise devoid of emotion
Riverdance
Best Man speeches
Forums where you have to register just to read content
"Normal view" in Microsoft Word
The 'Da Vinci' Code (the book or the 'of the same name' film)
People talking about how much babies weigh
Blog templates with a double sidebar even wider than the content area
Mr Potato Head
Dora the explorer
Dinosaur MSM journalist articles "discovering" or "explaining" websites and blogs
People complaining about tetra masts or power lines
2% milk (there really is less than 2% real milk in it)
Cartoon characters made into real people movies, like Asterix
Cartoon characters made into mascot suits like at Disney World
Disney World
Skull Candy earphones
Minimalism
Americans imitating an English accent
Americans saying things like "spiffing" around English people
Book rings (as in, a ring binder without the binder)
Skechers shoes
Magicians
Deviled eggs and eggs Benedict, not for the taste but for the guaranteed anticlimax inspired by their names
Singing coke cans
Wii sports shaped controllers
Advertising headlines that begin "discover the [productname]"
Eye contact
In movies, when the general rides his horse up and down in front of his army making a shouty "inspiring" speech
Sites asking for dob and mother's maiden name; normal sites, why tf, secure sites, er, like that provides any security
Massive charity or lottery cheques on TV
In adverts: "The new--- " implying that the old version of this model name had any recognition power
Websites which completely fail when you don't include the www subdomain
Government information/documentation sites that don't give a shit about redirects when they change their whole directory structure
Plesk
Windows update, restart now?
NO!
... OK, I'll just unnecessarily bug you every five minutes forever with a focus-stealing popup where you might be in the middle of typing a word and thus hit the hotkey letter for "restart now"
Philip Glass-inspired xylophone or vibraphone "seriousness" music in documentaries.
People karate chopping through bricks or in kung fu breaking tiles over their heads.
Dr Seuss
American TV series that take themselves seriously about doctors, crime investigators, lawyers, mobsters, or indeed any other scenario that enables "beautiful"* people to pose for the camera saying implausible long sentences in serious voices, and the whole series go on and on for years. *generally they are not, the men are plumply muscular and the women look botoxy and whine all their lines from the back of their whiny throats.
The Three Tenors
The Dreyfus Affair
People, especially journalists, thinking they are smart or funny referring to elephants as "pachyderms"
Comic Relief
Sponsorship
Saint Patrick's Day, especially if people call it St Paddy's Day or use is as an occasion to try to sell you something
The Corporate bad attitude of Skype/Paypal/EBay (as in, fsck customers, just make maximal money)
People not getting how to use apostrophes
Liquid shoe polish / "instant shine"
Godaddy and their annoying overly made-up orange skinned silicone-breasted mascot women
Sweetcorn on pizza
Conversations with taxi drivers or hairdressers
Menthol cigarettes
Hot tuna
Women in bikinis on motorbikes or sitting on the bonnets of fast cars
Pub Crawls (for this I feel compelled to explain three reasons for hating: 1. the way pub crawls are always advertised or organized in advance as if they are somehow eventful or important; 2. the use of the word "crawl" to suggest something more mystically interesting than simply "going to more than one pub in one day"; 3. the macho suggestion that you are going to loads of pubs when in fact it normally means two or three, which is not interesting and not an achievement of note
People wearing those big soft jester hats or soft top hats because it's funny
Most versions of the Bible... and especially the Good News illustrations
Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals
When Outlook screws up and you have to use "download headers" but you can't move or delete downloaded headers. Oh wait, I just hate everything about Outlook
Outlook Express
The way some people can do those loud whistles between their fingers, especially if it is a woman
Ditto for people making owl hooting noises in their hand
When companies attempt to have wacky "random" animal names like "Flying Penguin" or "Pink Llama"
Trying to answer people at work who ask questions or make suggestions about ideas that are so blindingly impossible I don't even know where to begin explaining the basics to them of why it is impossible
"Scientific" "studies" in the news that report an attention grabbing headline result but came to this conclusion from a pathetically small or unrepresentative sample of people
Lack of standard punctuation marks in Chinese: 、 not , ： not :, 。not ., ! not ! ....but....they sometimes use the western and sometimes not, at random in each paragraph
Massive ivory gates and intro filler in marketers' info products or videos, especially when they say "let's dive right in" and then go on blah blah about what they're going to tell you and what you're going to learn
fake dictionary definitions in marketing content e.g. http://screencast.com/t/H0n4fungCW or http://screencast.com/t/1dUgSXPP3Bt
Internet marketing info products which eschew the use of a spell checker
Florists spraying scent on flowers
When delivery companies, utility companies, etc come to your home during working hours on weekdays and then you either have to pay extra or seem like an annoying demanding person to want them to come at a time when you are at home
British bulldog (the children's game, in particular because it has nothing to do with bulldogs)
Twister
Bridge
Women going on and on about their weight and dieting and feeling guilty for eating anything
Weird American place names like boca raton, roca baton, baton rouge, ann arbor, chesapeake
Job applicant resumes smattered with words that can only have come from use of a thesaurus
Signature boxes too small for any real signature, especially driving licence and credit card back, I mean who when naturally writing a signature can fit it in a box of these proportions: |________| - on a cheque it is a little higher, but ffs would it hurt them to just have a big square?
People who cough in concerts
People who clap before the end of the last note in concerts
Electronic typewriters (partly for the sheer stupidity of the invention, partly out of annoyance for the pity evoked by the obsolete machines and their equally obsolete human users)
People taking book or play titles from meaningless snippets of Shakespeare quotations
Heath Robinson sort of humour (I think it's the implication that, in order to be funny, you have to make something "crazy" + "harmless" rather than apply your intellect to the real world)
IQ tests and the whole concept of IQ, especially people who quote or are proud of their own IQ score
Blu ray
Everything associated with "Outward bound" and "Leadership training"
The confusing relationship between the Pink Panther cartoon and the Peter Sellers movies
The appropriation of the image of Einstein to stand for cuddly "crazy but harmless" genius, despite the fact that 99% of people couldn't tell you what Einstein is famous for, and virtually no one understands anything that Einstein discovered. The worst offender being "baby einstein" - VO-MIT!!!
People writing i.e. when they mean e.g.
Picture captions that just say what's in the picture, even worse if they just list literally what is in the picture in the manner of a stock photo description e.g. http://screencast.com/t/88rSaYZbY1
Tattoos and the assumption by people with tattoos that everyone in the world would automatically like / be interested in their tattoos or the topic of tattoos in general
Expos and universiades
Metalwork art
Pulled pork
Not being allowed to not like Christmas
New year celebrations on TV
Anyone saying that the morning is the best time to get things done.
Facial scrubs (congratulations, you paid extra to have someone add sand to your moisurising cream)
Beds with sheet & blanket instead of a duvet. The sheet is cold and damp and the blanket is smelly and itchy and always falls off the bed. Even worse (and colder) is when the sheet and blanket are tucked, nay, stapled into the end of the bed so you can't move your feet without having the sensation of being in a shroud.
The way Americans call a duvet a comforter.
Vol au vents
Beta blockers
MS Frontpage trying to re-save all src'd images to a local folder, wtf
MS Frontpage embedding <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage"> <meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">into html header
MS Frontpage by default saving as .htm not .html
MS FrontPage's default folder "My Webs"
The general shortsightedness of M$ for not seeing that all document editing is going towards the web and not focusing on making FrontPage into a decent content editor or, dare I say it, CMS
The way whole major tools or features disappeared from one version of FrontPage to the next
The way ALL Microsoft products have a primary crust of annoyances so you cannot use the software properly until you go through this virtual learning curve of working around or hacking through these annoyances to get to the normal functionality underneath.
Everything about Harry Potter
Cliches relating to the glass is half full /empty
Government ideas that small tax tweaks might enliven a market, like reducing stamp duty might make people stampede to buy houses
Peanuts, fred bassett, love is, and all other cartoons where you spend large amounts of time staring at it on the london underground trying to work out if there is any joke or even logic there
Ridiculously tiny qwerty keyboards
(Someone explain it to me by all means) the way that catwalk fashion features bizarre clothing that no sane person would every actually wear in normal life, but this giant pretence is still the centre of the fashion world
Social kissing, mwah mwah guh [guh is the sound they make when I stab them]
Sites pointlessly disabling right click or text highlighting, or having no style on highlighted text
Failed dns lookups in browser leading to spammy isp pages
Sunglasses worn on top of the head
Pointless mascots unrelated to the topic, e.g. http://www.quatloos.com/tony.htm
Cycling helmets and cycling shorts
Flashing bike lights
Hotel shampoo (because real shampoo is too expensive or what, tf)
The amount of energy devoted to sports at school, when no one plays sports in the adult world
The way junior sports teams get called "Colts"
Gadget blogs reporting on yawn inducing big brand products
Strikes (as in, "industrial action", as in, yawn)
Ari 't Hart fly reels
Opera vibrato
Irish pubs
about.com
http://www.experts-exchange.com/
Logos or shop signs that so calligraphic and squiggly you can't actually read what they say. If it weren't for general familiarity, Walt Disney, Kellogg's, and Coca Cola would be perfect examples
The way any official fashion label etc big brand website has to be so purely made of flash it is totally impossible to load, let alone navigate
When people in movies have sex without any particular unbuttoning or unzipping
People in movies having conversations over injured people; or, people in movies having long final last words to their comrades while the enemy that was blasting them politely holds off
When the hero/ine stands over the hero/ine when s/he is dying, being all cry-y but not calling a doctor
Films where there isn't a second without some kind of music
When people in movies could just say one thing to explain a situation but they don't for no reason except just to create some unlikely disagreement or falling out etc
How the french call McDonald's "McDo"
The American idea of cheese
Wearing short-sleeved shirts
Baseball caps
Dog shows, cat shows, horse shows, dancing shows, beauty pageants, spelling bees, cheerleading competitions, pop idol and all one million variants
People directly expressing surprise in a conversation that you don't know something ... "what, you don't know?!!" as if that can be taken in any other way than rude
Merged cells in Excel
People patronizingly telling me I am "very able" or have "potential"
The way it is not ok to profile people by origin or race, when it comes to negative observations, but when it comes to positive attributions everyone including the people themselves think it is ok, especially when the good qualities are seen as equivalent to the place or origin, some kind of indescribable "I'm a real East Endaa" kind of mystique
That school smell of pencil shavings, polished wood, gym shoes, and crayons
Children's school nativity plays
Virtual trade fairs (just call it a website ffs)
Art/ dance "troupes"
Cars with the spare tire hanging on the back door; even worse if it has a small shovel there
People writing spam as SPAM as if it is some kind of acronym
The garbage html that results from copy pasting text from MS Word into MS Frontpage
People inserting unneccessary and screwed up section breaks in MS Word docs
Double spaced type
Government project leaders being called a Czar
People being jolly and loud in the morning
Intrigue, whispering behind people's backs, spying, gossip, office politics, shameless ass licking, clique-forming, inner-circle forming
Youth Hostels
Women's sports
Sports with stupid rules, or, more accurately, sports with rules that take more than one minute to explain (that's a whole list in itself)
Films that take themselves seriously
Films with any of my most hated actors in (separate list)
Hotpot restaurants in China
A massive list of other things specific to China
Ladyboys
Itchy woolen clothes
People thinking going to Starbucks is cool / sophisticated / insert any adjective here for whatever those millions of dumb people think they are, but most certainly are not.
Duke of Edinburgh's award in UK, especially when referred to as "Duke of Ed"
giving "cute" names to companies like "Freddie Mac" or "Auntie"
"cute" pronounceable acronyms for business projects or systems like PUMS, PIP, TOM, JoHN
old people describing themselves as "[65] years young"
A whole list of words and phrases that I hate; it goes without saying I don't like the people who use them either
People creating word documents in Letter paper size
The ridiculous difficulty of making A4 your default MS Word paper size
Microsoft Office 2007, I mean, wtf?
Stupid insane prices of Adobe software
Clipart
Popup windows that force resize your browser window
People confusing the obvious meaning of obvious words, e.g. "I wrote a new blog" when they mean "blog post"
People saying redundant words like "ATM Machine" or "PIN Number" especially when it is in official corporate ads or messages.
People writing with the top stuck on the end of the pen
Superficial public figures described as "caring"
Inanimate things like shampoo or mattresses described as "caring"
Animal romance e.g. in Disney cartoons they always have anthropomorphic animals falling in love, and the female animal has creepy long eyelashes
Electric bicycles (especially in China, where they are weapons of mass pedestrian carnage, but also in general, they are stupid, I mean, cycle a normal bicycle lardass, or just buy a ff'in motorbike)
Unneccessarily freqent software updates / patches - you heard me, Winamp 5.3.4.12.b.beta, FlashGot 3.2008.11.03.1130pm.v2
Academic secondary literature (i.e. books published containing only "research" of publications of other researchers)
Academic journals
Footnotes in books
Arts subjects in academia pretending to be serious studies and referring to their work as "research" when actually it only involves reading stuff that is already written.
"Shock" health messages on cigarette packets
Bug-you-constantly shareware
Animated Mr Bean
Morecambe and Wise
Kenneth More
People crying on TV game shows
Apple Macs and iPods, and of course the people who love them
Having to input a password to do anything in Linux
Wine with "funny" or "cool" labels
TV News and nasal fake urgency reporters
People wearing white trainers as everyday shoes
Sub SUVs that are supposed by some depraved stretch of the imagination to be "sporty"
Movie trailers that tell you the whole story
Headlines that say "The ------ just got ----er"
Websites with a logo at the top right which is not clickable to go back to the homepage
Crocs and the people who wear them
People saying / people who say "undies", "brolly", "mozzies"
When I was younger, adults seeing a bruise or scab and saying "Och! You've been in the wars!"
The Olsen Twins
Daniel Radcliffe
Journalist "funny" cliches such as "---- is the new --------"; "size does matter"
The Chicken Dance
People referring to Las Vegas as "Vegas"
Independently of Starbucks being all-round stupid and annoying, the abominable word "Frappuccino"
The corporate culture of Virgin, thinking they are cool / funny / quirky
Reply to all
Tom Jones
Barry Manilow
Archived email discussion boards, newsgroups, etc that get search results but don't show any information
Films about cards or gambling
U2
Wheelie shoes
Harry Hill
Jane Austen type dancing, or indeed any fake "period" type film where they have to do stupid dancing
Disney Winnie-The-Pooh
Yogi Bear
People saying they're "sickened" or "disgusted" by minor things
Standing ovations
The concept "you are unique" in education and fake humanist advertising (invariably told to us in a patronizing tone by a Scottish accent)
The song "you're beautiful"
Mendelssohn
Ocean sunfish
Pinatas
Sports reports in the newspaper that say someone or some team won, without saying what sport they are talking about
Monsters flailing around and going "meeaahhhraargh" into the camera in movies instead of just eating the hero
The theatre, mostly for being an example of a pathetically niche dying interest area receiving heavily disproportionate amounts of attention, but also for its encouragement of bad achkting.
Achktorrs being precious about the supposed importance of acting and theatre
Stupid names for nondescript loud music, like "house" and "garage"
Horse racing
"Sexy / spaced-out/ mysterious" roles for women in films, e.g. Lady in the Water, Serenity, Terminator (+ the TV series)
Being called "buddy"
People getting excited by beer, or thinking anything to do with the consumption of beer is interesting or amusing
Terry Pratchett
People whinging about being anorexic or bulemic
People whinging about being fat and/or dieting
The concept that obesity is a disease
People getting into Twitter so much that they make up words like "tweets" and "twitterverse" and "twestival"
Default installation paths in Windows using the name of the software maker as the parent folder
people who shout "oy" at you
blurbs on book covers that "explain" the book, or tell you the whole story
Penguin paperbacks
Literary criticism
Windows xp crash reporter "send / don't send" as if anyone cares
Raisins or bananas in curry
The way most "scientific" calculators come with millions of buttons for mathematical functions which 99.9% of users will never use
American date order MM DD YY, wtf
People measuring things in ounces or fluid ounces
People discussing the alcohol percentage of drinks
Online marketers referring to other online marketers as "gurus" always in inverted commas
Rolf Harris
Inedible salami skin
Pseudo science in cosmetics commercials
Blogosphere discussions about pay-per-post
Patriots
The (unscientific, fallacious) cliches that we only use n% of our brains, or that n% of human communication is non-verbal.
Apple / ipod / mac enthusiasts, especially the way they assume everyone would be interested to hear them talking about their stuff
Shortcake
Trying to do anything useful with a touchpad
The more-than-stupid IBM touchpad "nubbin" excuse for an input device
Internet Explorer
Windows Media Player
Flock
The Agadoo
Earnest choirboys
The smell of condoms
The idea that banana / strawberry (etc) condoms could be anything other than repulsive
Rock cakes
Microsoft program help
Stupid non-girl names for girls like Piper, Riley, Tipper, Bailey
People saying "the year" before 20- dates e.g. "the year 2020"
Web forms that say "type your email address again"
Javascript links
Having my suggestions ignored simply because they are made by me
The politics of Pakistan / India
The politics of Palestine / Israel
The domestic politics of Thailand
Caterers
The acceptance of ham as a refrigerated flabby bland green-sheen tofu-substitute
Pointless Guiness world records, especially the ones involving "world's biggest [food item]
Any email or person that says "don't ask why"
Chain letters
Long irrelevant discussions in meetings
People taking their baby everywhere
How all microwaves are ridiculously cryptic to use
Stripteases
Tea ceremony
Jukeboxes
Fruit machines (or quiz machines) in English pubs
English pubs
Not having codecs
Kids' birthday parties in fast food restaurants
Branding jingles at the beginning of dvds that you can't fast forward through
Being apologised to
Gateau forks
Frequent fliers... I mean, people who fly so much they know about which seats are the best, and discuss it with other frequent fliers
Pre decimal coinage (half a crown, wtf)
Stupid units of measurement like chains and gills
Charities having well-paid executive fundraisers
Never-ending charities for things that ought to be fixed once and for all by government, e.g. Great Ormond Street Hospital, Romanian Orphans
The assumption that zombies are either scary or ironic
Sites advertising "replica watches" as if one word from the thesaurus makes it not an illegal fake
News reports of layoffs
The idea that GDP figures mean anything
People using anti spam webmail which forces you, the sender, to fill in a capture before the person can receive the email
Leggings worn by women as if they are trousers, especially annoying are the ones with a foot strap
Racing bikes that have that foot strap that scrapes on the ground if you don't use it
People pronouncing almond as alll-mond
BBC News 24
People saying 'otel instead of hotel, rest'rON instead of restaurant
The song 'Otel California
People saying "perquisite" instead of "prerequisite"
Global awareness days and ribbons
Hellboy
White papers (because it's a pretentious name for what is just any old document)
White pizza
People expressing distance or area in terms of "football fields"; also, expressing rainforest area in terms of "the size of Wales"
Magicians
Actors in bare feet
Flipcharts
Jane Austen
Rallies, marches, demonstrations
Circuses
News reporters' nasal fake-urgent voices
Unneccessary ironing
Sports commentary
People talking to you assuming you have knowledge about some niche topic like Red Dwarf, the Peninsula War, Rock bands, Opera, Television of the '70s and '80s, Their car, Horse racing, etc and they can't take a hint that you are trying to to change the topic and make you feel unable to react in any other way than pretend to know what they are talking about.
The Atkins Diet
Pashmina
American people pronouncing "homage" as in "fromage"
Restaurants, hotels etc having a "soft opening" / "soft launch"
Variety magazine
Anyone who reads this web page and tries to discuss it with me

Things I Hate In China

(To qualify for this list it has to be something "only China" or "especially China")

Slow internet
Internet cutting / censorship that throws out the baby, bathwater, and locks the bathroom door
Forgetting something I was going to do online because of having train of thought cut by chinese internet cutting
Power cuts
Light bulbs wired in so you can't change them
Cheap fluorescent bulbs in the office that need replacing every month
Rats everywhere in the office
Waiting outside restaurants (seriously, nowhere is that good, and there are always 20-200 more restaurants within walking distance in the city)
Children beggars doing acrobatic performances (or, more accurately, the people who make them do that)
The dumb jeans they make the staff wear in supermarkets
Broken pavements
The "whingy xiaojie voice" in particular those entire TV series that have one main female character who speaks in that mock-pouty-baby-whiny voice the entire time and generally gets her way due to being whiny and generally provides a model for women to actually use that horrible voice and act like a spoiled baby under the illusion it is cute in real life.
Things falling off buildings
Men bragging about their sexual massage experiences
Bai jiu
Sugary warm beer
Chicken's feet as a snack
Snake on the menu
(more food items could be listed, but I don't know what most of them even are)
Children pissing everywhere
Grandparents with the babies in the apartment garden clustered around the gate getting in the way
Children at concerts
Gym parades and parade music at schools
Children wearing "cute" squeaky shoes
Mothers going "yi er, yi er, yi er san" teaching their children to march
Chinese nylon denier sockettes, worn by men
Chinese tea bag denier socks, worn by women with high heels or sandals
Men taking their shirts off in restaurants
Men walking around with their shirts rolled up over their belly
That annoying whiny voice waitresses use when welcoming you into a restaurant
Fake japanese used to welcome you into fake japanese restaurants
Fake japanese restaurants with warm, stale sushi on an overcrowded belt
Fake wasabi in fake japanese restaurants
Dead shrimp or dying upside down fish in the tanks outside restaurants
Old people climbing up mountains energetically with sweat towels
Old people doing weird creaky disco dancing in the park
A big list of things specific to Shenzhen
People spending all day reading in book shops
People buying fast food boxes and eating them on tables outside supermarkets
Chinese commando vampire mosquitoes, which will bite you over and over forever unless you find them and kill them
Spitting everywhere (of course)
Men putting their finger over one nostril and snotting out of the other, on the street
People sneezing everywhere
Girls picking their noses in public
Fat children in McDonald's
24 hour McDonald's being closed
McDonald's and KFC being so totally incompetently run here, even people who hate fast food already would consider it a disgrace
Men cultivating long hairs on their facial moles
Men with long fingernails
Men wearing bunches of keys on their trousers
Karaoke (in both its "family" and "pornographic" instantiations)
Men's stupid little fake leather handbags (if carrying huge amounts of cash to finance karaoke sessions, or just faking, both are annoying)
All Chinese festivals
Disorganisation about dates of public holidays
"Making up for" public holidays by working on weekends before or after the holiday
Young people still joining the communist party
Lifts that come all the way up to the floor below you, stop, then go back down
No air conditioning in lifts
The large amounts of people crowded into the lifts with no air conditioning
People standing around dumbly in lift lobbies blocking your way
People pressing the lift button lots of times to make the lift come faster
The incredibly slow average person's walking speed in China
Chinese TV (all dire, deserves a whole list, if not an entire course in the university of dire-ology )
The 'lottery'
People singing in public and not being hauled off to a mental asylum
The press blindly participating in brand smearing campaigns
Multimedia celebrities
No queues
Sports replays, both in frequency, irrelevance, and pointless bias
Irrelevant views in slo-mo replays during live sports on TV
The phrase "jia you"
Fake minorities in stage shows
Closing swimming pools months before actual winter
People thinking that anything connected with coffee is immediately sophisticated
Rat tail hair on boys
Canned laughter on live tv stage shows
Cheap computer generated cartoons on TV
Cheap corks in wine that break
Terrible red wine
Flashing LED children's shoes
Squeaking baby shoes
Hour-long hyped up infomercials
That song "gongxi gongxi gongxi ni" at Chinese new year
Straws with canned drinks
People complaining things are mafan (read: involves change to any ingrained practice however irrational and in need of change that practice is); especially considering everything in China is usually done in a way that is extra mafan and has not been subjected to any logic
Footprints on the toilet seat
Crazy English
Babies with shaved heads, even worse when the boys have a small square of hair left at the front
Da Shan
Factories claiming to be ISO compliant
The weird habit of using the term "PK" to mean anything competitive
"5000 years of history"
"Our china"
Justifying or explaining anything in terms of the overpopulation of China
Still complaining about the Opium War
That meandering brain-drilling lite saxophone muzak played continuously in "high class" restaurants
The way "soho" is taken to mean "work at home"
In Windows, everyone inexplicably right clicking the desktop and hitting "refresh" multiple times
Window-opening in freezing weather
The warped Chinese idea of what Excel is for
When people pronounce "dui" as "dooy-yaaa"
People coughing and sneezing all over the place
The concept of Osmosis in education and general luck-acquisition
Yoo Likaa Gym! Guys handing out leaflets on the street for gym clubs
People repeatedly hitting plus or equal key when adding things up on a calculator
People in offices using those really loud speakerphones to dial a number but putting it back to the handset to make the call after it connects, wtf
Lack of respect for documents, using anything to grab and write on
Insultingly obvious advertising concepts, e.g. alcohol makes you smart, car/eyedrops gets you chicks, [insert literally any product here] is associated with being middle class and having 1 male child
Chinese speaking pet laowai on TV
Nail clipping in public
The way everything is target="_blank"
The sound of ma jiang tiles clacking late into the night
Ignorant stereotypes like English gentlemen always carry an umbrella, or London is always foggy
Chinese people saying "orr ma gaaa" (oh my god), of course always at inappropriate times
The ridiculously mafan procedure of buying something and having to get a million bits of paper and fa piao
Inexplicable substitution of completely different consonants, e.g. "xifuan" for xihuan, "fulal" for hunan, "ni" for li, "lou" for rou
Drinking hand games, especially that one where you shout into the other person's face while waggling your hands and saying "fei-ya" over and over again.
Referring to judges on gameshows (all shows have judges) as "laoshi"
That advert where the guy stands by the car and says in a really loud annoying voice "errrrr hua errrr hua baaa baaa jiu baa" or whatever it is
The way razor blades in the supermarket are armor-boxed and require a masive procedure to buy as if you are buying a diamond or uranium fuel rod
Hunan TV variety show "funny" sound effects (various whistles, cymbals, boings, and looney tunes samples) and canned gales of laughter that are switched on and off in a shamelessly fake way
TV presenters repeatedly saying ooo-waaaaaaa to performers' stunts on stage
The assumption in China that a signature is just your name, printed, in your handwriting, and if they can't read it, it is rejected
Every single day, marketing phone calls to your mobile and junk SMS
When people say "shenme" in that raspy voice shamaaaaa?
The confusing relationship between Little Sheep cartoon, mattresses, and restaurants
The Shenzhen Universiade and all hype
The Shanghai Expo and all hype
Spot welding on the street
The entire contents of a local fire station blasting out their sirens as they drive down the road like little boys with new toys, then stop at the red traffic light with everyone else and wait in the queue with their sirens still on full
When I was teaching, when companies requested English training courses specific to their industry, like "hotel English" or "real estate English" but their staff could barely communicate at any general basic level
Movies about mah jiang
When Chinese mothers see laowai in the lift or on buses and insist on speaking random English phrases to their babies

This list is proudly under ongoing construction. All submissions are welcome.

Since I am obviously such a balanced, positive kind of guy, I have to list:

Things I like about China

-not worrying about prices when shopping
-everything falling over/off when the typhoons come
-stopping for smoke breaks in the middle of communal meals
-~~multi-entry F visa~~
-a small list of foods
-the smile on a little child's face [no, seriously, why are you still reading?]

Things I hate in Shenzhen

-K113 and K204 buses: lack of alternatives on these routes; overcrowding; infrequency; stopping at 1030pm
-The Shenzhen Daily newspaper
-Dongmen
-The way Hua Qiang Bei is not pedestrianised
-Lack of taxis in Nanshan
-Pollution and dust
-People generally accepting air pollution as "haze", "mist" or other innocent weather conditions
-Chemical tap water that makes everyone's skin bad
-Pearl and World TV being censored and playing the same Hong Kong public service ads for 5 years - da da, da da, da da, DAH da - Dengue Fever!
-The street cleaner truck playing an atonal version of "happy birthday to you" over and over again... this is on the borderline because it is so insane and insanely annoying it is ALMOST funny

Words and Phrases I Hate

From the redundant, to the pretentious, to the misused, to the just plain horrible on the ear...

Labuan
doily
Beetlejuice
Quetzalcoatl
apparatchik
ethnic
indie (adj denoting anything supposedly not mainstream, but actually indicating that that something is dumb)
fly (adj)
baba ganoush, tabouleh
troy ounces
double opt in
"chez" used in restaurant or bar names, "Chez Paul" etc
emergent property
center (reflexive verb, "I need to center myself", part of vernacular American psychobabble)
the truth will out
exceedingly (used by marketing copy writers to try to sound classy)
compunction
as of now, as of late
moral fibre
relaxing
metal (used as an adjective referring to things supposedly associated with heavy metal music, whatever that is)
jalopy
man with a van / man and van / white van man
well/nicely presented/appointed (estate agents)
car port
flirting
"benefitting from" (estate agents)
thusly
bespoke
natty
"How to [do something]?" indirect question in topic headings with a question mark
disgruntled
wake up call
"spotted in the wild" (gadget sites)
feel good
moniker
heartwarming
internecine
tiptronic
'legos'
varietal
curlicue
governance
supply chain
hermeneutics
TQM
extreme (as in "extreme sports")
prima facie
systemic
idiot
able (as in "you're obviously very able" told to me by countless grown ups when I was younger, before telling me that I have to fit in more)
fit in (seriously, are there any non-evil uses for this phasal verb?)
in and of itself (if you fall into this grossly redundant American habit, we immediately know you are not as smart as you want to sound)
it behooves
called for (in news as in "called for calm", "called for a ceasefire", "called for understanding")
think outside the box (if you say it, you're in the box, a big box of Cadbury's Cliches)
pax (used by people in hotels and tourism so they sound all knowledgeable)
centered around
decimated
morally bankrupt / spiritual crisis
adults calling children a "cheeky monkey", invariably in a northern accent "moon-keh"
biopic
serendipity / serendipitous
stimulus package
varsity
skinny (when applied to coffee varieties)
o' (as in big bucket o' chicken)
Def-con (in bad films)
Escapist fare (seriously, journalists, have you ever watched a movie that is NOT escapist?)
emerged as the voice of
probiotic
antibiotic
tendentious
mmporpg (yes, exactly, it is not a word and it certainly doesn't deserve to be an abbreviation)
rooster
hubby
feisty
lingerie
Soccer mom / hockey mom
"comprises of"
"the proverbial _____"
literally
luncheon
"ever so .... "
"..... as it were."
obeisance
heartfelt
helluva
gamut
innit, arncha, doncha
adenoids
grandfathered in
treatise
companionship
esteem
camaraderie
sartorial
gorgeous
hegemony (always used by consipracy theorists)
the powers that be
"Know" used in the imperative e.g. "but know this" especially in pretentious movie / fantasy context
Whampoa
Words ending in "-in" - Garmin, Belkin, Dunkin
inglenook
references to clouds having silver linings
butty
with extreme prejudice
overweening
feeling the pinch
Calling bird watching "birding"
decimated
folksonomies
multimedia
interactive
in real time
banoffee
heist

To bring balance back to the universe...

My Favourite Words

motet
semiotics
pendulum
lobotomy
spleen
bassoon
equanimity
bourgeois
grebe
whatsoever