Writing Topic Tuesday – The Petty Annoyance Edition

The number one way to make money in the world is to find a problem and solve it.  Most problems are too big to solve alone or with a small group of people. For example, providing an adequate supply of fresh water for everyone that needs it; solving hunger in our country (let alone the rest of the world); vanquishing the causes and consequences of drug addiction; or finding alternative fuel sources that are cheap, clean and easy to produce.

Courtesy of miguelb via Flickr

So we focus on the little problems. The petty annoyances that irritate us, but often not annoying  enough to do something about it.  Annoyance: Do you want to turn off your lights without getting out of bed? Solution: The Clapper. Annoyance:   Running out of shelf space for your CDs and DVDs? Solution: The MP3 and MP4 formats.  Annoyance: Tired of waiting for catsup to slide out of the bottle?  Or the mess involved with getting jelly out of the jar with a knife? Solution: The squeezable bottle.

Today’s edition is going to focus on petty things that annoy me. It will be challenging to use these annoyances as writing topics, but not impossible:

• Peanut butter that sticks to knives when you dip them in and gets everywhere
• Pistachio nuts that have no crack to easily open it
• Cats that get their claws stuck in fabric all of the time and when you try to extract them, you get bitten or scratched
• Getting email from a site that you once subscribed to, but is too complicated to figure out how to unsubscribe, so you just delete the messages unread
• People who are bad at communicating and you feel bad about telling them so
• LinkedIn when it has a suggestion for someone you might know, and when you try to connect to them, it demands more information or an email address to finish the connection.
• Microsoft Word – for being a pain to format when using an outline or numbering on a document (always messing up the numbers and indentation of lines)
• Dogs that snatch the top piece of bread off of your ham sandwich (even though you put the sandwich in the middle of the table) while you get a book from the other room.
• Bad Rolling Stones songs
• A speaker phone that hangs up if it is even slightly jostled
• Ignored emails that obviously require a timely response
• Junk email for golf equipment that seems to evade your spam filter, even though you’ve blacklisted several addresses similar to it and the sender has the SAME SENDER NAME AS THE ONE YOU BLACKLISTED.