.Pet Peeves (Page 3 of 4)

Groups of 3 or 4 people walking towards you on a sidewalk, and not one of them moves over to make room for you to pass without stepping onto the street.  Makes me want to give them a high five...in the face....with a chair.

Yes.  Mitt Romney is running for President of the U.S. as a Republican.  Our current President, President Obama is running for re-election as a Democrat.  When running, our President picks a running mate who will be the Vice President if he is elected.  I preferred the very old way when there were a bunch of parties and the guy with the most votes was President and the guy with the second most votes was Vice President and they were told to sit down and work it out if they didn't like each other.  But now the President gets to pick his own Vice President and they run together on what we call, for whatever reason, a ticket.  So the Democrat ticket is President Obama and Vice President Biden.  The Republican ticket is former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. 

Mitt Romney just yesterday or the day before picked Paul Ryan to join him as the Vice President candidate on the Republican ticket.  CNN and other news media reported this by saying "Romney to tap Ryan for V.P. slot."  What God-awful grammar and vocabulary.  Isn't it just painful to read?  Cutesy, short-cut language like that should not be used by serious news outlets. 

- Zurf

I am a victim of the Newspaper misquote/twist the story to make it more dramatic. A few years ago I was on a call to the northern area of our fire district which was used extensively by ohv enthusiasts. Two guys on ATV's had been run off a trail by some girls coming off a side trail. the guys went through the wire fencing dividing the ohv area from the freeway. One of the guys caught a wire on his larynx, crushing it. when we got on scene he, needless to say, having some difficulty breathing. I could not use the Ambu Bag ( used to force air into the lungs for thiose who cannot breathe on their own) and there were no landmarks or structure to do a needle crichothyrotomy (make a hole in the larynx so we can use the ambu bag to force air into his lungs). We don't have trauma centers where I work and the nearest one, Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, is 20-45 mins away by air ambulance. The ambulance got on-scene and I told them to transport the patient to the nearest hospital NOW!

The patient survived after receiving a surgical crich within minutes of arrival. The local rag picked up on the story and, in their zeal to hail the MD at the hospital ( who is a friend of mine and told me what the patient really said) they "quoted" the patient, who was a Spanish speaker only, as saying, "The paramedic said he could not do anything for me and I was going to die."

When I read that I went ballistic. One of the things I train new medics is to never tell a critical patient he is going to die unless he is and refuses our treatment. That kid needed more than I could do and I sent him to get the help he needed but I never said what he quoted.

It still bothers me today and I never trusted anything that paper printed after. That was my first hand experience of the press twisting words to get a "better" story. The problem was they effed with my reputation. Grrrrr.........

To get away from too much political BS, here's another that gets me going.  I don't really get mad about it, but it kinda makes me wonder.  People who have so much stuff in their garage that there is no room for the car.  My intention here is not to make you mad if you ae one of the culprits.  It just makes me wonder why?

One more thing. Kids walking around with their underwear sticking out or a t-shirt so long it looks like a dress. With a t-shirt that long, no one can notice the underwear sticking out. I got so sick of my stepson dressing that way I said" you want your underwear to stick out, here, "then I gave him an atomic wedgie "now they stick out". One time I actually started laughing at some kid that tripped over his because they were so low.

I'm glad you got that off your chest, Joey. feel better don't you?

Thought of one tonight as I was driving through my neighborhood and watched a nitwit go through two stop signs. He did not even do a courtesy slow-down (California Stop), he just went right through. This, for some reason, seems to be a big problem in my neighborhood and with all the kids around it is only a matter of time before someone gets hurt because some nit thinks he/she is too important to stop for a few seconds.

How about people who turn left at a light into a two lane with their left turn signal on and immediately cross both lanes to get to the right hand lane, all the while their left turn signal blinking away.  The book says turn into the nearest lane, look and put signal on, then get into other lane.  I'm not sure what they teach in drivers ed anymore or what the licence manual says, but few people follow it.  Just sayin'.

I had traffic vigilantes threaten the health of my daughter.  When my daughter was two years old, she had a seizure.  It was a baaaaad seizure and we headed for the nearest hospital.  I switched on my four ways, was flashing my high beams, and blowing the horn.  This is what the rulebook says to do for a civilian to temporarily notify other drivers of an emergency.  People were cutting me off and intentionally impeding my progress, probably trying to teach me a lesson.  I got up beside one of these jokers at a light and my wife rolled down her window and lit into that smarmy son-of-a-sea-cook like nobody's business, the whole while my daughter thrashing and screaming in her car seat.  The smug smile and all the color drained from his face right quick, let me tell you.  That guy wasn't the only one who decided to 'teach me a lesson', but he was the only one who got the opportunity to find out how ignorant he had been.  We got to the hospital and she received the treatment she needed before any permanent damage was done, but no thanks to the traffic vigilantes. 

- Zurf

That sort of rule - watch where you're going - tends to be self-enforcing.