Every once in a while, you just have a really annoying week. The toaster burns your cinnamon-raisin-parsley-garlic bagels. The shower alternates between “freezing mix” and “boil some lobsters” every few seconds. Your roommate’s cousin sleeps with your other roommate and suddenly your apartment is filled with a tension that can only be described as “glorious.”
My week started (as so many weeks this winter have started) with a wonderful snow storm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about snow. I enjoy snowball fights (complete with frozen bits of sand and road debris!), sledding and rows of small icicles overlooking the street. But when those icicles grow to the size of overweight children and start threatening to pierce skulls, I begin to worry.
The worst part of this weather for me is the poor condition of the roads. I live far enough from campus that walking is no fun. It’s long, boring and gives me too much time to think about stupid things such as the change in the ratio of mucous to nasal volume as the temperature varies. My preferred method of transportation—biking—is generally curtailed by a 20-below wind chill and a nice icy glaze covering the roads.
After a particularly nasty slog through the campus, thoroughly exhausted, I lay in bed trying to get some much needed rest. But my sleep was interrupted by a gradual thumping. Was it my promiscuous roommate? Nope. Was it my other, more promiscuous roommate? No. It was techno. Coming from the neighbors.
Fortunately, they answered when I knocked on the door. I explained that as it was 2:30 a.m. on a Thursday morning, I would appreciate some consideration. They did the obvious thing: turned the music up. As I laid on my couch, sleeplessly staring at CNN’s coverage of something involving wiretaps, my brain dissolved into a mush of recycled beats and oscillating chord structures.
The next day I trudged to school with one blood-shot eye and a hair-style that can only be described yet again as “glorious” to discover that I had an exam on something called Markov Chains. In my beleaguered state I couldn’t remember whether or not Markov Chains were a mathematical term for a linear system of progression or the name of a heavy metal band.
And in all honesty, I just didn’t care.
I made it home after writing what I thought was a brilliant treatise on the drummer’s relationship with the bassist’s cousin (or maybe I was talking about sociological trends of IQ scores over generations) and was looking forward to a much-needed nap. But my roommate met me at the door with some upsetting news: The heat was out.
In all probability, series of annoyances are just coincidences. While I cannot rule out the existence of a secret government project designed to pick random citizens to annoy mercilessly for small amounts of time, it seems rather far fetched even in my own paranoid state. I’m sure next month I’ll have a week where everything is wonderful. The birds will be chirping, the sun will be shining and the icicles will go on a crash diet and no longer threaten the integrity of my precious cerebellum. Yeah, right.
Meanwhile, deep inside an undisclosed sub-basement of an anonymous government building…
VOICE ONE: He’s on to us, commander.
VOICE TWO: Never fear. Operation Annoy has never failed. Remember our motto.
VOICE ONE: Choose at random. Annoy deliberately. Distract from anything serious or important.
If Keaton was a better satirist and less pissed off about the subject, he’d be able to write some sort of scathing commentary on the illegal wiretapping running rampant through our telecommunications systems. But he’s not, so he’ll write this snarky tag line instead. E-mail him at keatonmiller@wisc.edu.
