#oneaday Day 887: Things I Don’t Understand

Herein follows an updated (though not comprehensive) list of Things I Really Don’t Get, in no particular order.

• Football. (Soccer for the Americans.) Those who have known me for a long time will be well-familiar with my aversion to the supposed “beautiful game” by now, and its popularity continues to elude me even as I’m supposed to be feeling patriotic and English while Euro 2012 is going on. I just couldn’t give a toss, though. Related: I also don’t understand why those who like football complain about ITV’s coverage of it and then don’t protest about it in a form any stronger than passive-aggressive tweets. Don’t watch it if it bothers you that much. Crashing viewing figures would get their attention. (One response I received to this tonight was that they had “no choice” but to watch. This attitude is unfathomable to me when the vehement, often expletive-ridden criticisms of ITV’s coverage is taken into account.)
• Carly Rae Jepsen. Who the fuck is this person and why is their song Call Me Maybe so inexplicably popular at present? I listened to it out of curiosity on Spotify the other day and discovered a bland, predictable if marginally catchy pop song — certainly nothing remarkable to elevate it above similar offerings from other cheeseballs artists such as Ke$ha et al.
  
• Rage of Bahamut. Discussed in greater detail here.
  
• People who park in the pick-up area at supermarkets. Is your time so valuable to you that you need to park in an area that isn’t a parking space, Mr BMW driver? (Because it inevitably is a male driver, usually in an expensive German car) There are free spaces over there. I’m sure it won’t hurt you to get out and walk for an additional five seconds.
  
• People who comment on brand pages on Facebook. Discussed somewhat here. It seems that for some people, the “like” and “comment” buttons have some sort of irresistible magnetic force that makes these people unable to leave an inane post by a brand alone before they’ve posted “lol” or some equally asinine comment. I follow J-List on Facebook because (1) I like the pictures (2) I find the posts about Japan interesting
  
• Radio 1 giving an on-air guided tour of a festival ground when nothing was happening there. Radio 1 had/are having (I don’t care enough to check) some sort of festival, and the other day they devoted a good ten minutes or so to someone walking around the (unoccupied) festival grounds explaining where everything was going to be. The impact was somewhat lost by radio’s inherent lack of pictures.
  
• Jedward. Come on. Are we not over this supposed “joke” yet?
  
• Beauty products. Women must all be fucking scientists to understand all that crap they sell in Boots. I certainly wouldn’t know when to buy a “serum” and when to buy “body butter”.
  
• The enduring popularity of shit TV. I don’t think Take Me Out is on at the moment, but the sheer number of otherwise normal-ish people I follow on Twitter who voluntarily subjected themselves to this televisual carcrash is astonishing. Most claim they only did so in order to bitch about it on Twitter, but I can think of far less infuriating ways to spend an evening.
  
• Instapaper, Read It Later et al. I’ve never used one of these services so I don’t really understand what they do and can’t really fathom out how they work from their descriptions. I’m something of a traditionalist in the way I read stuff on the Internet — I go to the site, I read it. If I don’t have Internet access at the time, I don’t read it. If you’re lucky I’ll subscribe to your blog by email but that’s about it – I don’t use Google Reader or anything either.
  
• How you can play the same (non-MMORPG) multiplayer game for over 100 hours and not get bored. I got bored of the one time I tried Call of Duty multiplayer after about two or three hours tops. I got sort of into it for a little while but then realised that I wasn’t really having as much fun as I thought I should be having and that I didn’t feel like I was getting any better, either, so I stopped. The prospect of playing a multiplayer shooter enough to contemplate voluntarily paying a subscription fee for it is unfathomable to me.
  
• How Microsoft Word still doesn’t work properly yet. Word first came out in 1983, yet here in 2012 I am still getting frustrated by the fact it occasionally and unpredictably changes fonts for no apparent reason, decides to format my entire document in bullet points when I tell it to undo my last action and is just generally a big buggy mess. Surely it can’t be that hard to get right? It’s not as if I’m even doing anything advanced; this is basic text editing that still encounters these glaring flaws on a regular (but unpredictable) basis.
  
• How it’s possible to have a “collector’s edition” of a game that is only available via digital download. Special edition, fine. Premium edition, fine. But “collector’s edition”? No.
  
• Why all car parks don’t take cards. I never have any cash on me because I rarely need it, so I can imagine there are plenty of other people who live their lives in a similar fashion. Payment cards are so ubiquitous now; why can’t you pay for your parking with a credit or debit card in 95% of British car parks? (I made that statistic up. But it’s certainly a lot of them.)
  
• Fruit tea. It smells so good; it tastes so much like dirty bath water. Why must Nature be so cruel?