This thought infiltrated my mind with the waft of a ‘ploughman’s lunch’ on the train during my early morning commute to work today. For anyone unfamiliar with this term ‘ploughman’s lunch’, you’ve lived a very sheltered childhood, a very lucky childhood. It’s basically a cheese (sewage) and pickle sandwich, and the scent and sight of it makes my skin crawl.
Today my attention was brought to a rather ravenous commuter munching on his sandwich like he was attending the last supper. Which I found particularly revolting in itself, no hand sanitizer + grotty train = hepatitis by mid-afternoon. But little did I know the levels of grossness this guy would sink to had no limits. Once he finished (thank God), he proceeded to throw the sandwich foil on the ground and started picking his nose rather aggressively. I turned my head away in a knee-jerk reaction to this, but like we all do, when someone is doing something abnormally gross we have to keep peering back. Like, whenever we chop garlic and then can smell it on our fingers for days, we keep checking our fingers daily to see if the smell remains, don’t you do that? I peer down the train carriage at him as he digs for gold, my brow furrows even deeper the more he digs into his flared nostrils. Repulsive! Thank goodness I got off at the next stop, I can only fear what he would’ve done next!
It got me thinking, what’s your biggest pet peeve? For me the list is never ending but to save time I’ll have to go with these top 3 in no particular order :
- Loud talkers
- People who smack with their mouths while eating
- Queue jumpers
Let’s see what some countries voted as their top pet peeves courtesy of Forbes:
- Americans get more irritated than other nationals by co-workers taking others’ food from the office refrigerator.
- Brazilians are the most annoyed of any national group by excessive gossiping.
- Germans are annoyed by dirty common areas (the community microwave or refrigerator) more than the rest of the world.
- Indians react more negatively to irritating mobile phone ringtones.
- Japanese are more peeved by office pranks than others.
Relate to any of the above?
The Neon Squid 