6 Things People Get Way Too Worked Up About

I probably don't need to go on about the inappropriateness of the terminology, or I should hope not, so let's just suppose they used a less charged word, like it "destroyed" their childhood, or that it "tore up the foundations of my childhood, unraveling the very fabric of it at the subatomic level, leaving in its wake a devastated waste compared to which all imagined post-apocalyptic scenarios pale." Or "This makes me very upset!" Whatever.

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The point is that even if they manage to express being upset in a smarter way, why even be that upset in the first place? Suppose someone remakes A Christmas Carol where Scrooge is a cross-dressing drug dealer and the three ghosts are Aquaman, Ryan Seacrest and the robot from Lost in Space. Why not just keep reading the book and watching the numerous previous Aquaman-free versions, and ignore the new one?

It's not like they're cutting off access to the old, pure version that you like so much (with the exception of Lucas' new Star Wars rereleases, I guess, since you can't buy the original ones new now). You can just pretend the new version doesn't exist, like most Indiana Jones fans do with Crystal Skull.

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Apparently Real Genius was a sacred part of someone's childhood for some reason.

If you want to write in to a newspaper and remind them that Richard Nixon's screw-up brother was Donald Nixon, not Ronald Nixon, that's helpful, until you suggest that their entire editorial staff should be executed by firing squad for their failure.

I can see being disappointed in someone you thought had good taste when they confess how addicted they are to Jersey Shore or something, but there's a certain type of personality that makes a crusade out of it, like instead of just arguing with the Twilight fans in their life, they look for the nearest public megaphone (the Internet, usually) to try to reach as many people as possible with the vital message that Twilight is dumb and we need to fight back against the people who like it.

It's bad enough when they take it to a place where Twilight fans congregate, which is kind of like a Cowboys fan going into a Philadelphia sports bar to stir up shit -- it's just gratuitously antagonistic. But at least it makes sense, I guess, as opposed to when they take it to a place where nobody cares about Twilight either way, like the CNN comment section or something, which is more like a Cowboys fan going to an international figure skating event to stir up shit.

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Everyone is just going to be confused and not know what he is talking about, and he is going to rationalize to himself that people are throwing their tiny flags at him because they disagree with his brave opinion and not because he is ranting about things they don't care about and appears to be some kind of crazy homeless person shouting things.

Now, there's a couple of legitimate reasons to be at least mildly annoyed at bad media, like if a bad song gets stuck in your head, or if you didn't realize how bad a movie was going to be and it wasted your time, but if your time is so valuable that two wasted hours is a big to-do for you, it's probably too valuable to waste 30 additional hours attacking the thing.

I make a lot of jokes about other people's typos, but those are jokes, and they're not about going "Ha ha, this person made a typo, what a fool!" but about the end result, which is usually a funny sentence with a new, completely different meaning. If someone substitutes "their" for "there," I don't really care, other than the fact that I will never ask this person to proofread my resume.

Not everyone feels the same way. In response to an article about a legal battle between Apple and Samsung, of all things, one commenter had nothing to say about the alleged misbehavior of both parties, or people shouting in the courtroom, or anything boring like that, but he was straight out pissed about an error in subject-verb agreement.

Cnet

HOW COULD HE SAY "THERE'S BEEN TOO MANY" OH MY GOD JOSH LOWENSOHN AND HIS EMPLOYER WITH THE PROOF-READERS MUST PAY FOR THIS IN BLOOD.

I guess it was all worth it, because they corrected it. This commenter's new vein in his forehead will bear testament to his brave sacrifice that prevented an article about one day of a patent trial from having a slightly incorrect subhead.

Probably one of the things that causes the most irrational flip-outs is customers. Now I know a lot of customers in retail and food service are entitled jerks, and it's understandable (and entertaining) to complain about some of the worst offenders, but some people go way overboard, like this sandwich shop worker.

Booksie.com

There is only one word for someone who is hoping to buy their coffee and their sandwich in the same shop instead of at two separate stores, and that is "SICKENING."

Booksie.com

If someone is trying to be helpful about a broken pipe by informing the nearest open business in the hopes they will be able to find the proper authority, what they really need is a good self-fisting. And that leads to the worst offense of all, walking in the door of an establishment.

Booksie.com

When one commenter points out he may be getting a bit too worked up about too many little things, he tells them to calm down, as if they were getting hysterical.

Booksie.com

So go ahead and check with the previously linked article in #5 if you want, but I believe this would be the correct time to use the word "ironic."

One guy seems to feel that fat people should be restricted from wearing specifically Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch clothes for some reason. I can get behind that, because nobody really should be wearing clothes from those stores. (I might just be biased because of their previous racism flaps.) But some of the vitriol directed at fat people who make bad fashion choices seems a little excessive.

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Fat cows and bitches, that's not crossing any boundaries there, totally reasonable.

Another thing people seem to be rather high-strung about are skinny jeans. Again, these aren't the best-looking pieces of clothing I've ever seen, but I don't think this level of fury is proportionate:

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Or this:

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I wouldn't suggest searching for people's thoughts on fat people wearing skinny jeans.

Check out more from Christina in 6 Reasons Kittens Suck (Learned While Raising Them) and 6 Ways Cities Are Getting Into the Attention-Whore Game.