I was asked to write a guest post about the top ten things men do that drive women crazy. I came up with the standard ones, leaving the toilet seat up, farting, hands down their pants, that kind of thing, but I couldn’t come up with ten and my post went horribly in the wrong direction. The post was rejected and I was given a different topic to write about.

Since I do not live with a man anymore, at least not at present( and the 17 year old boy doesn’t count because I am raising him not to do those things, though he does anyway), I wasn’t able to come up with any more than those three or four. And they all seemed really petty to me now, though they did drive me crazy then.

But I wonder what things men and women do that drive each other bonkers.

Here is the original post:

There have been a million articles written about the things men do that irritate their women. We all  know that leaving the toilet seat up, clipping their nails anywhere but the bathroom, spending the weekend on the couch with their hands down their pants and performing  Dutch Ovens are things that drive women mad. Which is probably why men do these things.

Let’s face it, men, specifically married men, have gotten a bad rap in the last decade or so. They are usually portrayed as big dumb oafs on sitcoms and television commercials.  They stumble through life not knowing what to do. Thankfully they have their smart wife to steer them through life’s challenges.

I’m not going to perpetuate that myth. I love men. I do. And my track record of two marriages and two subsequent divorces proves it. At present I have been single just long enough to appreciate all the great things about men.

Now that I am single I have to kill all the icky things myself. If a toilet gets backed up I have to plunge it out. My last ex husband was a phenomenal cook, I ate well when I was married. So what that he couldn’t put a dish in the dishwasher to save his life, I had a three course meal prepared for me every day we were together.

If something needed repairing my guy could do it. Sure I had to nag all the time but isn’t that what he wanted me to do?

Even though I am divorced I haven’t lost the ability to look and act pathetic when something goes wrong. I can convey that ineptness over the phone and my ex husband will come over and fix just about anything. As long as I have cold beer in the fridge.

Not too long ago I was given a glimpse of what a great guy my ex husband really is. I was having surgery and he offered to hang out at the hospital and wait to see that I was okay. He took the day off of work, drove me to the hospital, waited for hours while they prepped and performed the surgery and then waited in recovery with me while I came off all the drugs they used to put me under. He didn’t even bring a video camera to capture all the bizarre things I was saying.

It gave me great comfort to know that someone was out there waiting for me, that someone cared enough about me to take a day off of work and watch game shows while I had surgery on my girlie parts.  He wasn’t obligated to do any of that. When he stopped at the drugstore on the way home to pick up the necessary feminine protection products and purchased them himself, I was reminded of what a great guy he really is.

We women forget that about our men. We complain to our girlfriends that all they do is hang out in the garage, go fishing with their friends, never spend enough time with us, never stroke our egos enough and all those other top ten things they do to irritate the hell out of us. When they do the little things like buying tampons or plunging out that backed up toilet we often take it for granted.

I’d take nail clippings and Dutch Ovens any day.

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This is a picture of me minutes after I lost my eyeglasses. I was taking taking two of my nieces on a jet ski ride and they wanted to do some tricks. So I did a few tricks. Tight turns basically and we all went flying.

These were not just any old pair of eyeglasses. These were prescription glasses. Expensive sunglasses. I wish I had a picture to show you because they were awesome. They were multi colored with shades of gray and lavender all swirled together. Not the greatest description but they rocked. Mostly because they held my hair up perfectly when I wore them as a head band, which was more frequently than I wore them as glasses.

I was berated for wearing my eyeglass frames as a hairband by my optometrist but they just did such a wonderful job, and it was a habit, I couldn’t stop. To this day I only choose glasses that don’t have the little nose thingies on them because they get tangled in my hair.

Anyway, We flew off the jet ski and surprisingly the shades stayed on my head. It wasn’t until I went underwater to get my hair out of my face that I lost them. When I came up I noticed my niece waving her arms and pointing to the water. Since I had water in my ears I couldn’t hear her but I looked to see my glasses floating down to the bottom of the lake.

Ever try diving underwater with a life jacket on? It doesn’t work. Those suckers keep you floating no matter how hard you try to go under.

The lake is 70 feet deep right there.

My glasses remain at the bottom of the lake. I think about them often because they looked so great. I doubt mine are the only ones at the bottom but I also doubt the DNR, or whoever drains lakes, would do such a thing just so I could get the pair back.

I did get another pair to replace the ones sitting at the bottom of the lake but they don’t stay on top of my head so well when used as a hairband. The look great on my face but what good are they if I can’t hold my hair back with them?

I don’t need another way to socialize with my friends online. I have my blog, Facebook, Twitter, my reader, email, linkedin (which I don’t use), Friend Feed (which I don’t use either), and the list could go on.

What the hell am I supposed to do with Google Buzz?

I use gmail and I work hard to clean out my inbox. Currently I have 897 emails in my inbox and I have spent the better part of the day trying to go through them and clean them up. I empty my spam folder daily. I hate seeing (23) next to any of my email boxes. Now I have Buzz and the number between the parentheses is constantly going higher and higher. All I need to do to clear it is click on it but when I get there I see people I know, one guy specifically, who are prattling on about one thing or another, usually followed by a link.

I’m sure I will find a way to annoy the hell out of everyone by broadcasting my blog to all of my Buzz followers but for now I don’t really know what I am supposed to do with it. Does it replace Facebook? I’d really like it if it did. I lose blocks of time when I go on Facebook so I try to stay away as much as possible. This makes me look like some kind of bitch because I feed my blog into Facebook, people read the post there instead of coming to my blog, make a comment on the Facebook post and then I have to go and comment on it there. If I had a few more hours in the day I would figure out how to automatically feed an excerpt of my posts into Facebook so readers had to leave the safety and security of the Facebook world and venture farther out into the web. But I haven’t had time so I’m stuck ignoring these people who refuse to read my posts on my blog. Bastards.

I’m not going to try to learn Buzz just yet. I presume it isn’t very difficult to learn, gmail was pretty easy and Google Docs has been a godsend. I need less social media and more hours in the day to actually get the work done that I am blowing off by playing with all these social meda apps.

It wouldn’t hurt if the public school system would hold classes every day during the work week too.

I talk to myself a lot. I also think out loud. Normally this isn’t a problem because I work from home and no one is around to hear me except the cat and the dog. When I have to make an important phone call I often practice the conversation. I consider what the other person would say so that I could have a response ready. I used to do this little exercise in my head but I have noticed lately that I am actually speaking the conversation out loud. I have even noticed that I don’t give them much air time. Even in  my practices I manage to hog the conversation. More often than not I speak the post I am thinking of writing before I sit down and bang it out on the keyboard. I hope I am not the only one who does this.

If I am in my home this is not a problem. The problem is that more often than not I catch myself as I am walking to the car or grocery shopping having conversations with myself. Several times I have commented to myself, out loud of course, that I have turned into one of those people you occasionally see on the street talking to no one. The people who usually live in a group home somewhere or on the street. I have also considered purchasing a BlueTooth headset so that I don’t look so silly or crazy. I have tried to hold my phone to my ear while having these practice conversations but usually they start spontaneously and I am talking long before I get the chance to get the phone to my ear. Putting the phone to my ear ultimately confuses me since I know I am not talking to someone. And, I worry that while I am holding the phone to my ear, pretending to talk to someone so I don’t look crazy,  the phone might actually ring. I don’t know how I would explain that but I am sure I would talk it out.

The reason I tell you this is because today I went to Office Max to get some office supplies. I picked out what I needed and brought them to the counter to have them rung up. The cashier, or team member, was a young man with piercings all over his face. He was also very tall. I purchased some card stock that was packaged in a cardboard envelope. The corner of all the packages of card stock had been crushed. I asked if I could open the package to make sure the card stock was not crushed as well since it would then have a difficult time going through my printer. He said no, not until I purchased it.

I didn’t get into it with him but I was a little irritated. I was also not properly dressed to have an argument with a team member. I had been preparing food for the big game and noticed, as I got out of my car at Office Max, that I had BBQ sauce all over the front of my shirt.

I let it go.

He scanned my two items as I swiped my card in the terminal. I thought to myself, as I always do when I have to swipe my card in the terminal, that there are very few things cashiers do anymore. In most grocery stores we have to bag our own items after running our cards ourselves. Cashiers used to do things like help you find things, answer your questions, ring up your purchase and bag your items. Now they just stand there to make sure the transaction is complete.

As I was thinking these thoughts the receipt printed and was spit out of the cash register. The receipt was right in front of me but I still think of the handing over of the receipt as the cashiers job. In fact I believe so strongly that this is their job I fear if I had grabbed it I would have been reprimanded, and rightfully so.

I stood there waiting for him to hand me my receipt but he didn’t. For a short moment we both stood there waiting for the other one to make a move.

Eventually he told me that I could grab my receipt.

“Don’t you do anything anymore?” I said not realizing I had actually said it.

“I suppose I could but you’re closer to it.” He said like a typical male teenager.

I grabbed my receipt and started walking away.

“I don’t know what the hell they pay you for. You’d think you could tear off one little receipt but I guess I can’t complain since you did bag my stuff for me, though you asked me if I needed a bag…” my little commentary went on but I was long out of the store by then.

Please tell me I am not the only one who does this.

****

I have some great Valentines Day things happening in the newsletter this week. You won’t find them in the blog. If you haven’t already signed up for it now is a great time to do so.

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In the last few weeks I have received many requests from companies asking me to tell my faithful readers about their products. I’ve been asked to write about diapers, make-up, facial tissue, and cell phones. Somewhere along the line, in the last few weeks apparently, Redhead Ranting has become a Mommy Blog.

It’s not.

I’ll repeat that.

I am not a Mommy Blogger. In fact when I had business cards printed this week that is exactly what I printed on the back side of the card. Not A Mommy Blog.

Yes, I talk about my kids but that doesn’t make me a mommy blogger. I found myself somewhat offended by this new status.

I have no problem writing about things I like and certainly no problem at all writing about things I don’t like. I’m not going to write about diapers however. We’ve been out of diapers for at least four years.

Not that I am against writing about these products but for cryin’ out loud send me some of the product or click on my advertising page and pay me to schlep your product.

Just last week I talked about the iPad, the Pope and the winter Olympics. So I have no trouble writing about brand name things. However, if you want to request that I say something specific about your product, rather than make fun of it, it would behoove the publicly traded companies to compensate me for my time and my real estate. I’d be really interested in blogging about a Mercedes, I don’t care what class.

I’ve worked really hard to get people to my blog, I am hardly going to send them to another website without getting paid for it.

As for being a mommy blog, if I ever refer to my kids as DD or DS, or start calling my ex husbands Dex#1 or #2 would someone please shoot me and put me, and my readers, out of my misery?

US Bank still sucks and apparently they don’t care. Just google the words “US Bank Sucks” and you get tons of sites stating as much. I found this one particularity interesting http://www.complaintsboard.com/bycompany/us-bank-a572.html.

I called my branch office yesterday to see if they would reverse the $200 in charges. I actually got rather livid with the person. And it felt good. She said to me if I had come in the bank, and the banker knew me, we probably could have stopped this mess. That’s when I got a little livid. I won’t rehash it here. They reversed $75 worth of fees. Woohoo.

Today, the transaction that I paid with a credit card because it had been sent back was presented for the second time. It showed as “pending” on my account. It also brought me back down to below zero causing more fees. I called the bank, they said they couldn’t gaurantee it would be stopped since it had already been paid. They will also charge me $30 for the service.

Why the hell is marked as “pending” then?

So I am in banking limbo until they update their system whatever the hell that means. Fuckers!

I’m thinking if they don’t turn this around I am printing up the list of “US Bank Sucks” and bringing it in there tomorrow. Saturdays are pretty busy for the bank.

What are they going to do? Close my account? Take away my birthday?

Bring it on!

Fuckers.