Whenever a new loaf of bread is brought into the house, my wife starts eating from it immediately, ignoring the fact that there are 2 or 3 slices left of the old loaf. Once when cleaning out the refrigerator, I found five bread bags, each with 2 or 3 slices in them, all pushed to the back of the shelf where I couldn't see them, all dried out or moldy. I hate that.

When I visit someone's house, and I need to pee, and they have one of those fabric covers on the toilet seat lid, and maybe another fabric cover surrounding the tank, and they are both so bulky that when I lift the lid, it won't stay up by itself, so I have to stand there and hold the lid up with one hand while I do my business with the other hand. Now, I'm so tall, that in order to keep my hand on the lid, I have to bend over slightly, which puts me off my aim. Or else I have to move around to the side of the toilet, if there's room, and try to hold the toilet seat up with my knee, which is also awkward and puts me off my aim. Or else I risk having the lid fall down while I'm in mid-stream.

When the local TV station uses a "teaser" to get you to watch their news. At around 9pm you hear "A common food additive may have already given your kids cancer. Tune in at 10 to find out what it is." Aargh! In the same number of words, they could have told me what it is.

When the national networks announce their program times, giving only the time on the east and west coasts, as if no one lived in the central or mountain time zones.

When I pass by a newsstand, and a magazine catches my eye with an interesting blurb on the front cover. I won't buy a magazine unless I'm fairly sure the content lives up to the promise, so I pick it up and try to find the corresponding article. The blurb on the cover doesn't give the page number, so I have to find it in the table of contents first. But the table of contents isn't on page 2 or 3; it's hidden behind several pages of advertising. So I find the table of contents, and scan the titles of the articles, but nothing quite matches what is on the cover. It is like solving a word puzzle to try to figure out which article corresponds to which blurb. So I have to keep flipping back and forth from the cover to the table of contents, matching titles and figuring out by process of elimination which article must be the one that the blurb refers to. So now I know the page number, and I go in search of the article itself. But even this is hard to do because most of the pages don't have numbers! Page numbers would spoil their lovely advertising layouts! So I finally find the article, and it turns out that the topic isn't quite what I thought it would be, or else it's only half a page long, not worth the price of the magazine. That's why I almost never buy magazines off the rack.