- Books with a “sneak preview” excerpt of another book by the same author at the end. Surely enjoying the book you’ve just read is advertisment enough for its author? Don’t waste my bookshelf space with paper trailers.
- The studio or technology ident films which precede some films on DVD, and go on for way too long. The Pixar one is bad enough, but the THX one (which is often consecutive with Pixar) feels like it lasts for about 15 fucking minutes.
- The “Fast Play” feature on Disney DVDs, the sole purpose of which is to delay the start of your film by showing you ads for other things instead.
- Smug-as-fuck animated children’s film characters.
- Trying to watch a film trailer on Youtube and having to watch adverts first. Essentially, watching adverts in order to earn the right to watch another advert.
- The way that more and more services and organisations require hardcopy proof of address, at the same time as fewer and fewer provide it.
- Packaging which is designed in such a way that you can’t use the last bit of the product.
- The tendency among contemporary educational establishments to refer to “learners” instead of “students”. It has an insulting suggestion of passivity: these people aren’t doing anything active and difficult like studying, they are simply learning, floating around and absorbing information from the educational environment.
- When something is described as being available “24/7/365”. Surely it should be either “24/7/52” or just “24/365”. Or, you know, “24/7” which already means exactly what you’re trying to say.
- The word “staycation”, in the UK sense. Its original US meaning was a holiday which consists of a series of day trips from your own home. This is a particular phenomenon which warrants its own name, so regardless of the aesthetics of “staycation”, it was at least doing a useful job. But when imported to the UK by lazy, ill-informed journalists, it became simply “a holiday in the UK”. Not only does this not need its own word, it’s class snobbery to suggest that it does.
- The term “boutique” as a synonym for small.
- Cash machines which tell you to say how much money you want, “in multiples of £10”. I’d like 10 multiples of 10, please. Oh no, you’ve given me £10.
- Gift shops. I’m outraged by the very concept of a gift shop. A shop that defines itself as containing nothing that anyone would ever buy for themselves. Because everything in it is shit.
- Vapes. I find it un-fucking-believable that as a society – after having made significant progress in reducing smoking, and also while professing concern about plastic and electronic waste – we seem to have sleepwalked into allowing mass consumption of what are essentially plastic, electronic cigarettes targeted at children.
- Ice cream with bits in it. Stuff that has no business being in ice cream, like raw dough and marshmallows and shit.
- Bottle conditioned beers. Breweries, it’s your job to give me a finished product that I can enjoy at leisure. Not a dexterity challenge where if I fail, I make the beer undrinkable.
- Millicano coffee. Mixing some ground coffee in with your instant coffee granules does NOT make a premium product. It makes instant coffee that still tastes shit, and now has a gritty sludge at the bottom.
- Oxo cubes. Why are they the most popular brand? They’re shit. They’re mostly salt. The foil wrapping is impossible to get off. They get all over your fingers when you try to crumble them. They’re just bad. Stock pots are better. Making your own stock is easy too, and uses up food waste. Why are we still in thrall to Oxo’s foul droppings?
- Pom Bears. Even people who are otherwise very concerned about ensuring their children eat healthily and avoid junk food seem to believe, for some unfathomable reason, that Pom Bears are a wholesome, nutritious snack. It’s weird, because what they obviously are is a hideous mixture of powdered starch, fat, salt and sugar. They’re no different to any other ultra-processed pseudo-crisps like Pringles, except they’re pressed into a cynical child-friendly shape.
- Book jigsaws. If you don’t have children, you’ve probably been lucky enough not to come across this exemplar of an “innovative product” that is objectively worse than its predecessors in every way. It’s a book in which every page has a jigsaw puzzle embedded in it. Sounds cute, right? Wrong. The pieces are all thin cardboard, much thinner than normal jigsaws, and bend and break much more easily. The book’s story is invariably dogshit, a talentless hack job as flimsy as the jigsaw pieces. And the very worst thing about it is that because there’s no box for holding the pieces, you have to complete every jigsaw back into its page before you can put it away: an infuriating burden on your time which is the very last thing a parent needs.
- Vauxhall indicator sticks. Despite the standard mechanism of indicator sticks which has been established for decades and allows a driver to intuitively use them on any car, some years ago Vauxhall decided that it would “innovate” a slightly different mechanism. With Vauxhall’s completely unnecessary redesign, the stick always returns to the middle, whether you’ve applied a partial or full indicate, meaning that there’s no visual or tactile feedback to tell you which you’ve done. Also, to manually cancel a full indicate, you have to apply a partial indicate in the opposite direction. But if you accidentally push too far, you’ll end up indicating that way instead. If you ever see a Vauxhall driver indicating erratically, now you know why.
- The pointless “innovation” of concertina-joined Post-It notes. Just stop it, 3M Company. Post-Its work; don’t try to fix them. The traditional Post-It pad, all joined on one side, is perfect. Joined on alternating sides like concertina folds, they provide the exact same functionality, with one difference: if you try to pick up the pad, but fail to grasp the whole thing from both sides, it stretches out from the table like some kind of lame stationery prank. It’s a fallacy that customers always want more choice: in this case, we definitely don’t want the choice of a product which is nearly identical, but shitter in one specific way.
- Graphene. If you live in Manchester, it seems to be a heresy to say anything against this wonder material. Everyone has to pretend that it’s going to be the foundation of a second industrial revolution, and that all of our futuristic sci-fi gadgets are going to be made out of flakes of graphite. In 2004, two researchers in Manchester touted a smudgy bit of sticky tape as the future of manufacturing. Since then, hundreds of millions of pounds have been poured into graphene research, including at a National Graphene Institute. 20 years later, there’s an 8,000+ word Wikipedia article on “Potential applications of graphene”, and yet still no actual applications. Excuse me if I don’t share the enthusiasm for what seems like the most over-hyped thing to come out of Manchester since Be Here Now.
- Toilets lights which switch on with a motion sensor and off with a timer, but there’s no motion sensor in the cubicles, so you end up wiping your arse in the dark.
- Air-dried towels. The ones you get given when you visit the house of someone who doesn’t tumble dry their towels, because they prefer you to experience what it would be like to zest your skin with a box grater.
- The Dyson Airblade V, designed to blow water from your hands straight onto your crotch.
- Dyson vacuum cleaners. Fragile, over-engineered gimmicky pieces of crap. Give me a trusty Henry any day.
- The Dyson company in general, which represents the triumph of marketing over real engineering. They apply the same formula to everything they make: pretend it’s an amazing, innovative product by loading it with complicated, useless plastic crap that’ll break the first time it’s used.
- James Dyson, the tax-dodging arch-cunt who inexplicably made billions of pounds from selling flimsy, disappointing vacuum cleaners. And then sold us all the ultimate broken product – Brexit – before off-shoring his company to Singapore. And then, because these gilded pricks can never imagine that they could just shut the fuck up and we’d all get along fine without their great wisdom and influence, he had to pop up again to support Truss and Kwarteng’s economy-trashing mini-budget.
- Alan Sugar, and his self-aggrandisement as a business guru, even though he’s basically a mediocre businessman who got lucky in the property boom. I don’t mind either that he’s a property magnate or that his other businesses failed. What I do mind is that presents himself as a paragon of business success, to the extent of being ennobled and appointed as a business advisor by the Brown government.
The Hate List – Volume 21
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