Things That Really !&$%2 You Off

If next door's child is anything to go by, it can be very hard indeed. The parents were also rowing at 3:30am...

I don't think it's always that simple, Balls Man.

I know, and that's why I can't jump to any conclusions - other than that it makes me want to have children of my own less.

Anyway, one of the children is definitely a baby, and you can't really stop babies from crying. That's what they do.

I've always been under the impression that babies sometimes just start crying and don't stop until they're tired, which can be from anywhere from ten minutes to a couple of hours. Certainly that's what I did as a baby, or so I've been told, and nothing would get me to stop whether it was kind or stern words.

Balladeer wrote:

The couple next door have a young kid that has been screaming its head off since 8.  I'm in no way suggesting that the couple are bad parents, however - screaming for 50 minutes almost non-stop?  Surely it should be possible to calm it down over that period?  Surely?

Actually, how many parents do we have on here?  Is it just OS?

Some babies will cry non-stop for hours and hours and hours. Be grateful it lasted a mere 50 minutes. A crying baby that isn't inclined to be consoled will not be consoled no matter what you do. We were lucky, both our daughters were great. Not so great for a close friend who suffered massive sleep deprivation with a baby that would only sleep whilst being driven in a car. That baby literally never stopped crying.

I was impervious to crying. I would lay down on our bed with our crying child, who was clean and fed, and well, and fall asleep whilst they were crying right next to my ear. It just didn't bother me. However, another person's crying baby? Not so much fun. Especially on an aeroplane, when I have severe phobia of flying. I am trying to zone out and a screaming baby breaks that and I suffer greatly.

Which brings me onto children in restaurants or pubs. Hell, in public places.

We were seen and not heard as kids. These days, that doesn't seem to be a thing; and it drives me mad when I hear a parent swearing at a child.

Stu_the_great wrote:

Which brings me onto children in restaurants or pubs. Hell, in public places.

We were seen and not heard as kids. These days, that doesn't seem to be a thing; and it drives me mad when I hear a parent swearing at a child.

Whilst I think children are perfectly entitled to be in any restaurant at any time, I do have a problem, but it isn't with the children, it is with the parents. You mention swearing, but that is the tip of the iceberg. It is the yelling, the threatening, or the completely oblivious to the destruction their children are up to. It is almost like they are deliberately inflicting their poorly parented children on all. I think a restaurant is fully entitled to ask them to leave if they can't control their children (a baby crying is different, but a smart parent wouldn't take a baby to a restaurant).

My partner has a long history of not liking children and has been known to 'accidentally' put her foot in front of a child running around being obnoxious, causing said child to fall flat on their face, resulting in tears and a fake apology and care from her. I don't personally recommend it, but it is an idea.

oldschool wrote:

Stu_the_great wrote:

Which brings me onto children in restaurants or pubs. Hell, in public places.

We were seen and not heard as kids. These days, that doesn't seem to be a thing; and it drives me mad when I hear a parent swearing at a child.

Whilst I think children are perfectly entitled to be in any restaurant at any time, I do have a problem, but it isn't with the children, it is with the parents.  You mention swearing, but that is the tip of the iceberg.  It is the yelling, the threatening, or the completely oblivious to the destruction their children are up to.  It is almost like they are deliberately inflicting their poorly parented children on all.  I think a restaurant is fully entitled to ask them to leave if they can't control their children (a baby crying is different, but a smart parent wouldn't take a baby to a restaurant).

My partner has a long history of not liking children and has been known to 'accidentally' put her foot in front of a child running around being obnoxious, causing said child to fall flat on their face, resulting in tears and a fake apology and care from her.  I don't personally recommend it, but it is an idea.  

You are quite right, Oldschool. There's no such thing as a bad child (to an extent), but a bad parent in a public place. If we'd have left the table as kids, we'd have been for the high jump.

Small children at weddings are worse. Although I agree that you can't blame them.

Balladeer wrote:

Small children at weddings are worse.  Although I agree that you can't blame them.

Small children at the cinema is worse. If you can't get your child to sit still and be quiet, take them out and leave the rest of us in peace, to enjoy the movie that cost us real money. We never had an issue with our children at the cinema, or anywhere - were we lucky or just good parents? We could take them anywhere, including their great-grandmothers house cluttered with knick-knacks. She said our children were the only ones allowed in the house because they didn't touch anything. We made it clear to them at a very young age that they were not allowed to touch things that didn't belong to them, which made shopping free of dramas.

A child will only do what they think they can get away with.

Oh, I was awful when it came to touching things that didn't belong to me. I wanted to prod everything when I was younger, just to see what happened. Scientific mind!

Balladeer wrote:

Oh, I was awful when it came to touching things that didn't belong to me.  I wanted to prod everything when I was younger, just to see what happened.  Scientific mind!

That's me now!

Facebook, or more specifically, internet etiquette. I have a person on my Facebook and frankly, their posts bore me to death (most of them), but I just can't delete people, as it seems rude (although I did delete 3headed Monkey, which is fair enough). Now it seems to me, based on some replies that the person would probably like to delete me, but perhaps can't for the same reasons. It is a duel to see who cracks first.

I like the idea of Facebook and it is what you make it, but sometimes I think it is more trouble than it is worth. It seems I am just as bad at socialising digitally as I am in person. I really just don't get the unwritten rules of society. I know I can come across as abrupt - people tell me that all the time, but so often people do to me exactly what they complain I do to them, but I am rude if I reply in kind. It just annoys me and reminds me why I retreated from society decades ago.

You can just mute people, rather than blocking them. I'm still friends with almost everyone I've worked with or went to school with, but I only see the posts of those who for whatever reason interest or amuse me.

Drunkalilly wrote:

You can just mute people, rather than blocking them. I'm still friends with almost everyone I've worked with or went to school with, but I only see the posts of those who for whatever reason interest or amuse me.

Yep, I just made the person's post unseen. That should account for about 30% of my traffic then, as they were quite prolific at posting.

There seems to be a strong theme between pregnancy and muting people. Man, people who are about to have kids are twats.

Pregnant people are infuriatingly smug.

Not to mention a combination of FEEL SORRY FOR ME posts and auto "ur bebe is nao 4 weeks old and is the size ov a pea" posts

Rental inspections. Because I have to clean the entire flat from top to bottom before tomorrow morning. I should actually be cleaning right now but I'm the worst procrastinator in the history of mankind, so naturally I've left the five hour job of vacuuming the entire house, scrubbing both the kitchen and bathroom sinks, cleaning the shower screens, and getting everything presentable till the last minute. I'm really good at cleaning, it's just the starting part that is the most trouble.


Sigh. I guess I really can't put this off any longer, if I do I won't be able to get to sleep on time.

This one should annoy Balladeer ....... Order of Operations.

So you have this mathematical equation, a nice simple one:
3 + 4 × 5 =
but, according to PEMDAS, you do the Parentheses and Exponents first (not in this equation), then you do the Multiplication, then the Division, then the Addition and Subtraction, so, that simple equation actually gets rearranged to this:

4 × 5 + 3 = 23

Why the hell don't you just write the equation that way in the first place? Or just put the damn Multiplication part in brackets?

Why make things unnecessarily complicated?

You say "complicated", I say "simple".  All very well in that sum, but consider a case where you have three baskets with five apples each, and four baskets with ten apples each.  The natural way to write the sum is:

3 x 5 + 4 x 10

Write it using your method without brackets.  No, don't - if it is possible (haven't thought about it that hard), it's much more easy to write things like the above.  As for brackets, it's equally easy to write (3+4)x5 as it would be to write 3+(4x5).  In fact, the first expression looks tidier and less "top-heavy".

BIDMAS (as we called it, with brackets and indices) in maths is like punctuation in English - a series of rules that may seem complicated, but are actually there to make things simpler.  When omitted, they make things much more complicated for the next person down the line who has to pick up your (plural, not Oldschool's specifically) mess.

I haven't needed to do this kind of mathematics since about 1979, so I haven't really thought to hard what it is called.

Surely (3 x 5) + (4 x 10) =, whilst having extra bits, is still clearer. Sure, if you know the rules, you will just do it, but why have the rules to remember in the first place when the brackets make it clear how it is worked out?

If you use a normal calculator, you will always get the wrong answer, as a scientific calculator is required to do it right (lucky I still have one of those). Why do we need two calculators that will give you different answers to exactly the same question? At least the rules of mathematics are fixed, unlike English, which is why I really love mathematics. I mean, how else was I going to work out how much our rainwater tank held if I didn't know pi and the right equation?

I stand by my feeling that it makes it more complicated.

I suppose it depends on your definition of complicated; is it more complicated to have to know orders of operation or to write parentheses?

Hang on a minute... at school I was taught division came before multiplication. Have I been doing it wrong? *runs away in terror*

I've just written a thing for work in Excel that doesn't bother with any of that and goes from left to right, thus enforcing brackets. I want to make it mathematically more kosher. I'm properly scared about attempting to do so now. *runs away again*

Not to blow away anyone's mathematical education, but the operations that are inverses of each other can be done in any order. That means you can have BODMAS (as it was in my day) or BOMDAS (doesn't sound good) or indeed BODMSA. I like Triple-O, because it provides a set of rules that you can refer to in times of need.