5 Small Problems Way More Frustrating Than They Should Be

The shift in body weight at this specific point in a curved stairway caused what is known as the "ass over tea kettle" effect, hurling me as though I were a dwarf at an Australian bar. I lunged like a clumsy ninja headfirst into a wall, where I crumpled like an accordion and fell victim to momentum's petty whims, tumbling around the curve in the staircase and down the remaining flight of stairs into another wall. It was as though my ass got kicked by every other part of my body, which it in turn kicked back at. Nothing didn't hurt. For a moment, I assumed I was going to die there in a Jim-Carrey-esque mishmash of humanity at the bottom of my stairs, blissfully free of dog poop, yet broken and beaten like the self-esteem of the main character midway through an '80s teen dramedy.

I lay there for some time, shifting slowly like a glacier, until I somewhat resembled myself again. My dog came to see if I was preparing food or not, but little else occurred. In time, I was able to battle back against the sinister forces of gravity and attain an upright status. And it was at this point that I decided enough of this shit, I was just going to sit and have some food and relax for the rest of the day, because obviously the day was not ready to accept me and all that I am. I prepared soup.

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Anyone who knows me knows that I assume soup fixes everything. I learned this not from my own grandmother -- who was a useless maniac and once slapped me in the face and justified it by telling my parents I'd told her to fuck off and go home at the tender age of six months -- but from movie grandmas. Movie grandmas were wise as shit, and they made soup. I made soup this day. A bowl of hot-as-balls chicken noodle and vegetable soup. And just as I sat at my table, worn and beaten by a day barely started, ready to drown my sorrows in barley and potato, my goddamn spoon slipped along the side of the bowl and vanished like DiCaprio below the greasy sea.

Was it because I had just hurdled poop and fallen down a flight of stairs in a painful yet curiously not-fatal way that soured my mood? Maybe. But watching that spoon descend to the depths of my meal was the last straw. I cursed like the world's surliest sailor, like a truck driver who just acquired rectal conjunctivitis from a lot lizard, like a dock worker forced to listen to Taylor Swift at work. I cursed the heavens and all below them, for that goddamn spoon was the tool by which my day was to be salvaged, and it was gone. Gone several inches into a bowl. And I was fucking pissed.

Did I get another spoon? Yes. Everything was fine. But for three solid minutes, the world was on the precipice of being swallowed by my rage. You have no idea how close you were to the End Time.

Maybe this is just me, but I have a terrible habit of planning a fairly elaborate meal of some kind -- crowned rack of lamb, baked shrimp over wild mushroom risotto, Hot Pockets a la mode -- and then, once I have the stove on and a pot boiling and some ingredients chopped up, I realize that one of what will inevitably be the three most important ingredients is nowhere in sight.

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Obviously, you shouldn't be planning dinners without the necessary ingredients, but we've all had that experience of going shopping, buying what you need, and then a week later realizing that your friends / family / guy in the crawlspace are jackasses and have ransacked the cupboards without your knowledge and made off with a key component of Spicy Pig Foot Goulash. So you of course had cause to believe the meal was a go, and are in no way at fault for going ahead with what you had initially planned. Right now, you're a hero. A dinner hero. And the person who took your quail eggs is a goddamn monster.

The real tragedy of this scenario is the sense of defeat you feel when you realize your entire plan just unraveled like a secondhand sweater and left your midriff exposed on the bus with too many prying eyes and licking tongues appraising your physique in a way that makes you uncomfortable. I don't know about you folks -- and why would I, because we haven't met -- but when that shit goes down over here, I just quit. I won't even eat that meal, I skip it and make plans for the next meal. I can't deal with that kind of defeat; just have to move on. So sure, I'm hungry for another five hours, but I'm focused.

As the download remains stuck and the constant space-tapping does nothing, you may find yourself contemplating the most drastic measure left to the computer user: the escape key. You'll hit it once tentatively, and once you've realized nothing happened, it becomes like the down button on an elevator and you just mash that fucker for all its worth, in your mind a little voice saying to you, "Escape! Escape! Let me escape!" as though it might truly happen, even though we all know it won't.

At this point, if the download hasn't resumed, there's one option left: the ctrl+alt+del route, which always ends the same. You press it until the task manager comes up, then quickly dismiss it in the hopes that doing this jogged some shit free. When it doesn't, you do it again, then open the task manager and probably find that your download isn't even listed there as a running application. Maybe an associated program is, and you'll still give it a few more minutes to finish, hoping that this threat of download demise will make it want to live out its usefulness. Alas, no such luck. Kill it. You know you want to. Kill it, then download the whole goddamn thing again, because you can't not do it. And just relax, knowing that everyone else does the same thing.

I recently bought quite a fetching new pair of jeans, and I'm not ashamed to say that my ass looked stellar in them. Everyone likes a good ass day; it puts some pep in your step. But your step is fucked completely barren of pep when the single button that is designed to maintain a pair of jeans at your waist busts loose, leaving you with two limp denim leggings joined in the middle in classic "trip the nerd" fashion.

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More sinister than a popped button is when a tragic and elderly pair of reliable old boxer shorts breathes its last and then releases its spirit to the ether, losing all elasticity as it does so and causing your underpants to shimmy down your ass with each and every step you take, until they're pooling around your crotch like a cottony doughnut which you're positive, despite your faith in physics, will somehow portal out of your pants and land with a plop at your feet for all to see.

Of course, it never does leave your pants. Instead it loafs about the bottom of your ass, like Brad Pitt's character in True Romance, causing no end of discomfort and a worry that your pants are now puffy and giving others the impression you may be wearing a diaper.

Despite the fact that I'm insisting this is probably very common, and generally happens in a very private moment when few if any others are around to witness it, have you ever broken the plane and raked a finger through the mulch and not thought "Oh for fuck's sake" to yourself?

This immediately causes you to become the one-handed hero of an action movie, holding your other useless stump aloft as you seek some way to staunch the wound -- or in this case, just wash your one finger without accidentally touching anything else in the room. So you make your way to the sink, apply enough soap to prepare for several surgeries, and scrub away as though shame itself were oozing from your pores.

Realistically, it takes, what, five minutes to fix this problem? And that's a generous period of washing, at that. Still, in the moment, this pretty much seems like a dealbreaker for the entire day. And in some cases it is, because if you don't wash correctly, you're going to ruin everyone else's day. No one wants to shake hands with Poo Finger. Best to remove yourself from circulation and try again tomorrow.

For more, check out 6 Design Flaws That Annoy You Every Day (And Why They Exist) and 6 Things That Annoy You Every Day (Explained By Science).

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