The teaser on Malcolm in the Middle where Hal gets home and the hall light is burned out. He gets a new lightbulb out of a closet and finds that the shelf it’s on is loose. He gets a screwdriver to fix the shelf, and the drawer the screwdriver is in squeaks. To fix the squeak he goes to the garage for a can of WD40, but it’s empty. He starts to go to the store for more WD40 but the car won’t start. Lois leans into the garage and asks if he changed the bulb. Now with a major car repair in progress he says, “What does it look like I’m doing???”
This entire bit lives rent-free in my head. I literally think of it once per month or more.
Worse: when I’m literally seconds away from doing it.
I don’t understand this mentality, acting like a toddler just makes you look really bad and makes people not like you… it’s ok to be annoyed by it but changing your behavior to look like an asshole will never make sense to me
Pretty sure they were being facetious
Except I know tons of people actually like this?
From what I understand it’s like robbing someone of their agency. Now they are doing the thing at the behest of another’s intent instead of their own free will. It’s a perfectly cromulent feeling for one to have. How it gets handled is another thing.
Cromulent
This guy gets it. Being asked to do something and doing it immediately creates this “hi, I’ll do stuff immediately when asked” thingy.
If you’ve been taken advantage of because of inability to say no to random shit and being a pushover then it really feels like you’re regressing when doing a task immediately.
Another situation where it’s just supremely annoying is when it’s a pretty obvious next step like when you’re cleaning the bathroom mirror and a person asks you to clean the toilet. I’d literally tell a flatmate I didn’t feel like it even though I was seconds away from doing it.
It’s also often about the relationship you have with the person that tells you to do something. Maybe you want to please your spouse, but rebel against your parents? Maybe someone has been a dick before, or refused to do something you asked, and you feel resentful? There are unavoidably multiple personality traits and relationship nuances that affect how you react to things like this in different situations
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If you don’t want to do something, do you have to do it anyway unless you have an adult-sounding explanation for why? If people telling you to do things makes you not want to do them, does that make your feelings not valid?
When I comment on a very specific detail of a post or a comment, and people go off on their hot-button topic and act like I was implying I’m against them. Like if I mention somebody’s shoe is untied and I get accused of hating shoes, or socks, or get lectured on the history of knots and why I shouldn’t hate knots. I mean jeez, do people actually read the material or just scan for trigger words?
Missus: Have you done the litters?
Me standing over the litterbox with a garbage bag in my hand: …
Me on every fucking outage call at work.
Like Jesus people just STFU and let me fix it. I don’t need to be on a 4 hour conference call about how to fix it with everybody in the company telling me the wrong thing to do…I need five minutes to concentrate and just fucking fix it.
The way I usually do it for people doing that to me is to do a loud confirmation like “Okay, you want me to do X on Y, I’m doing this based on your confirmation, which you gave after I shared my concerns.” Usually they’ll say yes, then I’ll do it and it’ll inevitably blows up on them and they stop bothering me.
Rinse and repeat for every new guy that wants to do that.
It has a name: Reactance
Autism has Pathological Demand Avoidance as a theorized category of symptoms. Being asked to do something, regardless of willingness, generates anxiety and a desire to avoid the request.
There needs to be an idiom for this so you can to tell people to fuck off quickly in this situation. Like “mind your horse”, or “said the fool to the tiller” or something
A gorilla in the hand is worth two horses.
“Don’t stick your finger in another man’s beans.”
Don’t whip a horse that’s already sprinting
If I’m having a heated debate/talk witg someone and someone just chimes in, I literally become a raging gorilla.
Here’s one my supervisor does often, bitching at me about something from two weeks ago that’s already done and over.
“This hasn’t been done!”
“Yeah it has, go look”
“Well it wasn’t done two weeks ago when I checked”
“Wtf”
Boss: Is X done yet?
Me: Did you check the ticket?
Boss: don’t you know?
Me: Update would be in the ticket.
Boss: well check and let me know
Spoiler: it was done and noted as such two days prior.
I like it better when they know as well as I do that I don’t know off the top of my head and need to check the exact same source of information that they could have
That’s weird? I thought people were being annoying when they do that
Not weird to be angry about that.
I will stop, drop, and walk away slowly, all while maintaining eye contact.
Me: repairing the roof before it pisses it down, but despairing at things not going my way.
The wife: “You’re tired. Leave it until tomorrow.”
Me trying not to be sarcastic or angry: “It’s goingggg to pisssss it down. It needs to be fixed today.”
Wife: “Yeah, you are tired”
Me internally: BOOM
I know when I am tired. 98 times out of a 100 I’m the one who calls it quits when I’ve had enough.
Continually stating the obvious when I’m pissed off AND tired doesn’t make the things that need to be finished magically go better. It just pisses me off even more.Trillioniares!
