Audience Participation: The Twitch Rally

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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35 Responses

  1. Burt Likko says:

    I voted soup spoon, with bent nail a very close second.

    When the spoon goes down into the soup you’ve got to figure out a way to get it out. You can’t just stick your fingers in there! So now you’re using one or maybe two other pieces of silverware and then you’ve got to figure out how to clean off the spoon handle. Especially if you’re in a restaurant, all these tools may not be handy. In theory, a taller, narrower soup bowl would prevent the spoon-in-the-soup problem, but soup that isn’t of uniform texture would experience settlement and sorting of various parts and you don’t want that.

    The bent nail bugs me a lot too because sometimes a replacement nail isn’t handy, and prying out and hammering the nail straight makes the wood and the nail weaker and mostly doesn’t work right, and even if you have a replacement nail handy you’ve still got a distortion in the wood you didn’t intend.Report

  2. fillyjonk says:

    Toast is worst because both ruined food and mess to clean up.

    Soup spoon is second worst just because it happens to me SO MUCH (more commonly when I’m cooking something and want to stop stirring for a moment and just leave the spoon in the thing)

    The sports things don’t bug me because I’m bad at sports so I expect the basketball not to go in the hoop or the mini-golf ball to miss the hole. I would count either of the things in the .gif “near successes” for me because they are so close.

    Of course, the REAL controversy is in “how do you pronounce “.gif”?”Report

  3. Michael Cain says:

    Gas fill goes at the bottom of my list. It’s been years, perhaps decades, since I bought gas that wasn’t on the credit card. I look at the gallons counter so that I have an idea of whether the tank is actually full when the pump shuts off, but not the dollars counter.

    I voted for the downloading as the most irritating. Perhaps because I let my Mac download and install an OS update this morning, which requires a reboot, and the screen sits during the process showing “Approximately 37 minutes remaining” for ten or fifteen minutes, without changing.Report

  4. Aaron David says:

    The bent nail. If for no other reason that I know what causes it, hitting the head off square, which means I am not paying attention. This is followed by the vending machine.Report

  5. Mike Dwyer says:

    The soup spoon thing bothers me the most because it feels so easily preventable. Longer handle on spoon or less-wide bowl. Problem solved. Most/all of the others ones involve some degree of physics or human action slightly skewing the results. I can live with that.Report

  6. pillsy says:

    Vending machine and pinball machine.

    I think you may have a good idea where most of my quarters went in my youth.

    And I still spend way too much on vending machine soda, but you can use a credit card now. They still screw up and steal my money and don’t give me the motherfishing soda with unnerving frequency.Report

  7. Maribou says:

    None of these bother me much except the toast (winner), the soup spoon, and the bent nail.

    The basketball, the pinball, and the vending machine generated a twitch but only a twitch.

    The rest struck me as “within acceptable parameters” and didn’t set off anything.Report

  8. Pinky says:

    The soup spoon is unhygienic. So is the bread, but that’s obvious. I assume that the trauma of the bread is having to clean it up when it could have landed the other way. Those two and the nail are the only ones that constitute waste. But nails are cheap, and you can always give the bread to animals. The soup goes down the drain.Report

    • Maribou in reply to Pinky says:

      @pinky For me the trauma of the bread is that I just made toast, buttered it, jammed it, and now I have to start all over before I can have toast.

      That outweighs both the mess (which is annoying) and the lack of any animals in my house who will eat the toast (which hadn’t even occurred to me because we’ve only had cats for the last 20 years).

      I confess if it had landed jam side up I would probably have invoked the 5 second rule, dusted off the bottom, and eaten it anyway.Report

      • fillyjonk in reply to Maribou says:

        Also with the toast: usually it’s 6:30 am, I’m tired, I’m facing a long day at work and OMG WHAT ELSE IS GOING TO HAPPEN.

        I very likely would have scraped off the jam and reapplied fresh and just eaten it. And probably left the messy floor until I got home. Because I might have time to fix a new breakfast OR clean the floor, but not both, and I am not teaching for three hours plus on an empty stomach.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Maribou says:

        Oh, I’m not saying that you should leave it on the floor and wait for your pets to eat it. I meant you can always leave bread outside for the squirrels or feed the ducks or something. If you ruin soup, you can’t leave it out on the porch.Report

        • Maribou in reply to Pinky says:

          @pinky Ah. Leaving food outside here is a good way to end up with raccoons the size of blue heelers on your porch.

          (I looked this up to see if I was exaggerating and I am not. In fact, adult raccoons in North America weigh between 11 and 57 pounds. That weight range is NUTS. Ours are definitely blue heeler size, or bigger.)

          I swear the family living in the storm sewer across the street from my house are so big that it’d take about 4-5 northeastern raccoons to make weight on ONE of the suckers. It’s quite eerie when they stare at you from up in a tree….)Report

          • Mike Schilling in reply to Maribou says:

            We get raccoons prowling around the yard at night looking for things to eat, and, yeah. Their size and the fact that they are not at all afraid of people makes them pretty scary.Report

            • Maribou in reply to Mike Schilling says:

              As long as they are not staring up at me or ready to fight over the garbage bag we foolishly left on the porch overnight instead of dumpstering, I think they’re kinda cool. I mean, they *look* like the ones I grew up around, including the one my cousin raised from a kit that would come back and visit us every summer after he grew up and left home…. it’s fun to watch 40-50 pounds animals compress themselves into storm drains and such…. and the babies are cute.

              Then I have that up-close-and-personal thing and I start thinking I need to buy some ammo for our guns….Report

  9. Marchmaine says:

    Nail…bad technique all around.
    Egg… fresh eggs don’t break like that, so sad that people are eating old eggs.
    Toast… Its not the splat/mess, its the fumble then 50/50 chance it falls the right way and you can still eat it.

    Seems food fail looms large in the Marchmaine universe.Report

  10. Em Carpenter says:

    I was torn between the pinball and the download bar.

    Did not care about the basketball or golf because that is me all the time.Report

  11. Mike Schilling says:

    Worse than all of these: when reading/watching/listening to something and they don’t quite get the math quite right. E.g. Brooklyn 99 had an episode where Holt was obsessing over a math problem a superior had given him. One obvious question: does it have a solution, or did the guy ask Holt the question just to torture him?

    The way the problem is initially stated: no solution. The way it’s discussed later in the show: yes, solution. Argh!Report

  12. dragonfrog says:

    The firework.

    All the others, you just go “Oh well, that didn’t work” and set about dealing with it. But the firework, you don’t know if it’s going to go off after a delay, so you’re going to be sitting there doubting yourself about whether you’ve waited long enough to account for delayed ignition.Report

  13. Mike Siegel says:

    I voted downloading because that used to drive me nuts. And still does. But given the number of options, we should probably run a second poll with the worst-performing options removed. So of an instant-runoff voting to prevent a Trump-esque ballot from happening.Report

  14. atomickristin says:

    Vending machine by a mile.

    Not only is my tasty beverage in limbo forever, I’m out my money. I can’t even console myself with plans to avoid the dilemma with better technique in the future. It wasn’t my screwup, it was the screwup of whoever was meant to be maintaining the machine – the guy who profits off of it.

    And they KNOW it because they’ll be able to see the stranded drink and will walk away with the money and the drink laughing at whoever got skunked. In fact, everyone who walks by between then and whenever it’s fixed will probably chuckle at the jerk who didn’t get their snack. So you’re the butt of the joke too.Report