I’ve been thinking recently how anything that is annoying is really just a difference between two people. Ground-breaking.
But it extends from annoying to ridiculousness to stupidity to rudeness to infinity. When you start to try and frame everything as a type of difference, things like ‘dumb decisions’ disappear and whatever was hidden beneath the label can be seen for what it is.
Real self help shit right here muthafuckers.
I have a blinking orange light on my coffee machine. It is new. For all of my schooling (both books and hard knocks) I still don’t know how to translate a blinking orange light on a coffee machine into some action. It’s like a crying baby to me, I don’t know what the fuck it wants; someone else will sort it out. Let it die for all I care. Rot in hell you un-christened screaming piece of…
Focus Dirk, focus. Fix the orange light.
To the internet!
Interlude: I just clicked “I’m feeling lucky” on Google and it sent me to a casino webpage.
After some searching, I found that the exact model I have (the 525-718-M-Dynamic) never actually existed. Luckily the 525-718-L-Dynamic, which has a similar set of buttons, seems quite popular. There is no manual, but the good folk that make my coffee machine have a forum.
A forum. Because the internet needs more places where people can comment.
Within these comments, on a thread about the blinking orange light, I learnt that the orange light represented the fact that the coffee machine should be de-scaled. The scales, I assume, are on the inside.
I must buy a bottle of de-scaling liquid and go through a process. I do not read what the process is. I do not want to do the process, and will run whatever health gauntlet I must to not have to buy a bottle of de-scaling liquid and go through the process.
I read on, wondering if I can not just get the light to stop flashing. Others in the thread were also coming to the conclusion that this would be a nice, though scaly, way to progress. It was here in the thread that I read the comment that the orange light was “fuking stupid”.
Now, I’ve spent quite some time with my orange light over the last few weeks. I found it shy, a little reclusive (intermittently), but I would think it’s a little bit harsh to call it stupid.
So while at first I agreed with the learned commenter, my thoughts got to a wanderin’ and I thought about how it got to be that the light was flicking and could not be turned off. And it’s flabbergastingly uninteresting: someone wrote a line of logic somewhere that said if the coffee machine needs de-scaling, flash the orange light, if it doesn’t need de-scaling, don’t. They don’t hate me, they don’t want to rape my face off, they aren’t a blithering fool (necessarily), they just made a decision. A decision that I would not have made.
It seems almost incongruous: “someone made a decision that I would not have made, but that’s OK”. It doesn’t even have to be OK, it just is.
This is feeling very anti-climactic; there’s only a few paragraphs left (I’m from the future) and I’m not sure exactly what my point is.
Since then, everything that has annoyed me I have tried to boil down to the one person that made the one decision that I would not have made. When I picture that person making that decision that I would not have made, I shrug my shoulders and move on with my life.
Something else: my spell checker knows that the ‘M’ edition of my coffee machine never existed. That’s pretty fucking weird.
Update
The flashing orange light broke me. I murdered my neighbour’s fish. And, since you can’t tell from the letters alone, I will tell you: multiple fish. She had, like, 14 fish. Killed em all. Fucking stupid orange light.
You May Know Me 