TAKE BACK YOUR TIME
Being really annoying is a crime, contends Nury Vittachi
If you feel like you’re stuck in a busyness trap, it could be time to take control.
I HAVE AN ETHICS ISSUE. What do you do when you’re having an argument on Facebook and an incredibly stupid, annoying person joins in, but they’re on your side? It’s shocking that society has no answers for huge moral dilemmas of today.
It’s an odd truth that annoying people often turn out to be useful. A case in point was sent to me by a reader recently. A daring robber raided a bank in the US state of Vermont and got away. Elsewhere
in the same town on the same day, a woman who was the sort of annoying person who gets called an ‘eco-Nazi’ – my family is full of them – was putting a piece of garbage in her bin. She noticed someone had thrown away a paper coffee cup in the LITTERBIN instead of THE PAPER RECYCLING bin. Outraged, she retrieved it and found it contained a crumpled piece of a paper with writing on it: “THIS IS A ROBBERY GIVE ME THE MONEY QUIETLY AND NO-ONE WILL GET HURT.” Police guessed it was the robber’s practise note and immediately set off in pursuit of the woman’s cleaner’s boyfriend.
The moral of this story? ALWAYS put draft copies of illegal threats you write in the correct bin.
In another example, a Spanish debt collection agency employed a bagpiper and a dog with an annoying yap to visit the houses of debtors.
More recently, the Minnesota police department in the US announced that arrested people may be subjected to a really annoying Justin Bieber video “all the way to the jail”. There was no follow-up report on whether the crime rate fell, but I worry that there may have been an unexpected boom in arrestable crimes committed by teenage girls.
The one group of Annoying People whom I rarely find useful are folk who are Excessively Politically Correct. An example is the British Medical Association, which recently issued a guidance document telling doctors and nurses they could replace the term ‘expectant mothers’ with ‘pregnant people’ to include ‘trans men who might become pregnant’. This is a bit much. Of course, it is possible that I may be swamped with angry letters from pregnant ‘trans men’ but I will take that risk.
It would be annoying to lose the word ‘mama’, a term you find in almost every language in the world. The exception is Buckingham Palace in London, where the Queen’s babies have to address her as ‘ma’am’ or find themselves on the ‘to be beheaded’ list. Now that would be annoying.
The moral of this story? ALWAYS put draft copies of illegal threats you write in the correct bin