The Refillable Water Station at the Airport Never Shows a Count of How Many Plastic Water Bottles It’s Saved... and Other Indignances We Don’t Talk About

Warning: This is an extended and colorful, for lack of a better word, rant of all the things we notice every day and never talk about but should.

The dirt on mushrooms is impossible to remove.

It’s impossible to remove the dirt from the edible mushrooms you buy at the store. Simply rinsing mushrooms does nothing. But they’re too delicate to scrub (and I mean, would I really scrub them if they were sturdier? Please). And even when I massage them (ok, I did that once), I didn’t feel I really got it all. There was still dirt and I’d taken an extra step and now I was slightly annoyed.

I rinse the mushrooms in the colander and I hope that Nick doesn’t see the specks of dirt clinging to the caps and stems. If we don’t see it, it’s not really there, and modern day humans are too sterile anyway right?

We’ll get to that later.

The presenter of some PPT deck or what not has been presenting for 45 plus minutes and says, about some bullet point or question from the audience, “We’ll get to that later in the presentation.” You suddenly realize that the presenter intends to utilize the full 3-hour block of time scheduled and you deflate inside like a balloon.

Serving sizes are horseshit.

How many times have you picked up your box of cereal and felt your eyes roll back with rage? “A HALF CUP? A measly half cup is a serving!?” My spirit has never been bolstered upon pouring the correct serving size of cereal into a bowl. Lucky Charms should be a full two cups serving size so help me God.

I already said bye to you.

You say goodbye to a coworker and then they come around the corner again when you’ve run back to get your lunch box from the fridge before you leave, which you realize you forgot.

“Haha, how funny is this?” you pretend when you see them. “Goodbye again! Farewell! Auf wiedersehen!” while inwardly you spew: WTF. I ALREADY SAID BYE TO YOU.

I need ten lifetimes and early retirement to watch all the Netflix recommendations.

“OMG Guys. GUYS. I started bingewatching this new show,” your friend says (or YOU say. We all do this—you’re guilty, I’m guilty).

“You’ve GOT to see it. It’s called the Jester’s Tic Tac Toe Move.”

The Guys: “OMG totally! Will add to queue right now!” They take out their phones to “write a note.” Beep bop boop, adding to the queue! they wink. (They’re actually checking Instagram).

The “Guys” immediately forget and never watch. Only with repeated cajoling do they get to it, at the sacrifice of all the other streaming show recommendations that have been foisted upon them.

The food at Marshalls and TJ Maxx is questionably cheap.

Doesn’t it make you slightly suspicious? How is this 100% Kona coffee $3.00? What is in this package and what has happened to it to make it this cheap? I wonder as I override the misgivings and add it to my basket.

I didn’t know this existed five minutes ago but now that I’ve seen it, I will die if I can’t have it.

You walk into a store. You have a mission: A Scarf for Cindy.

But then, out of the corner of your eye, you see a white sweater with light blue pattern.

You stop dead.

Need, the animal inside you says.

But we’re only here for a scarf for Cindy.

Need, it persists.

It doesn’t matter that you set a budget for $50 and this brings your total to $215.

You’ve been having a hard week, your boss yelled at you, you were an only child, there’s a pebble in your shoe.

You think for a moment. Cindy doesn’t need the scarf. In fact, it strikes me now that once she told me she runs hot.

With that taken care of, you wrap your arms around the sweater, ditch the scarf and only feel a smidge of self loathing at the check out.

Later you write Cindy a happy holidays card instead, from inside the warm white sweater.

The little metal box in the women’s bathroom

For people that get their periods: Why have we accepted this?

There is literally no way, unless we bring two hazmat suits in and three sets of latex gloves, to be hygienic when disposing of a tampon or pad into those terrible metal boxes.

We’ve walked on the moon. We’ve cured polio.

We can’t come up with something better?

And OK, HEARD, to the people who are saying “Just use a little toilet paper to lift the metal cover and THEN fling the tampon in”—NO. I’ve tried this a million times! Sometimes that little piece of toilet paper sticks to your fingers or you fling it so hard you accidentally touch the metal bin then you have the germs of 1000 antecedents on your hands. WE’RE BETTER THAN THIS!

I await with bated breath the day a new invention storms the women’s bathrooms until then I will suffer, but not silently.

The refillable water station at the airport never shows a count of how many water bottles it’s saved the world from.

It’s always at zero or blank.

Buying another reusable bag because you forgot yours again defeats the purpose.

I have nothing more to add here.

I’ve taken so many books out of the library I can’t read a single one.

This might just be a me thing.

The stack I’ve taken out just sits there, fat and squat and overwhelming.

On a Tuesday, I might touch the top one as if to start reading it (this sounds eerily like my inability to make granola) but I put it back, deciding to go check the mailbox again instead. (

Then three days after the books are due, I trudge back to the library and drop them in the return bin.

Printers don’t work

Printers and umbrellas are the greatest hustles of the consumer world.

It’s either the ink, jammed paper, or just a simple mysterious F you, not gonna work today for no particular reason at all. There’s practically a sign on the printer: “Off today, back tomorrow. Maybe.”

There’s almost no rage equitable to the rage I feel when the printer doesn’t work.

And in terms of umbrellas, with one strong gust of wind, the $7 umbrella you bought from CVS joins the metal graveyard surrounding every Boston trash barrel on a windy day of inside out, broken-armed umbrellas.

Encores

Half of us don’t want the encore, we want to go to bed. Please don’t play more and don’t make us cheer for it. I ate three Sbarro pizza slices before I got here and have subsequently drank 5 Harpoon IPAs; I was done on Song 7. Please get on your bus so I can go home.