On Things Just Generally Being Frustrating
Some people ask me why I seem so pissed off all the time. While I try my best to remain calm and patient, I am quick to temper and I complain a lot. Well, the reason behind all my annoyance is very simple. There are a LOT of little tiny things that annoy me.
And let me be honest here. I’ve been to therapy. Mostly for depression, but partly for my ill temper and awkward way of breaking down at everything. Because I do break down in tears a lot. I normally do so because something has gone horrifically wrong. But for me, things go horrifically wrong all the time. Life is uniformly shit and I am constantly having to deal with random problems that pop up for no reason.
Let’s take the other day for example. It was a spotlight hour, and I wanted to use a Lucky Egg and my daily incense in Pokemon GO. That sounds pretty normal, right? Sounds pretty simple. Open the game, spin a Pokestop or two, catch some Pokemon. I’d opened the game 10 minutes prior to see if there were any raids, and the game worked fine. So I open up Pokemon GO, use my incense and lucky egg and start walking. I see a Dratini and go to catch it. The game freezes when I tap on it. Fine, I’ll restart the app. I restart the app and the game refuses to load. Firstly it says I can’t sign in, and when it does let me sign in, I’m brought to a black screen.
Nothing can get me past this black screen. Restarting the app, restarting my phone, restarting my data. I have to uninstall and reinstall the app for me to finally be able to open Pokemon GO. By that time, my lucky egg and incense have both run out, and the Dratini was gone. A simple action that should have taken me 10 seconds ended up taking nearly half an hour.
That sort of thing happens to me all the time. And no, it’s not because of my phone. I have a second phone, and it does all sorts of similar shit. In fact, despite being bigger, newer and having better graphics, the other phone will randomly display the message “GPS not found”. To fix it, all I can do is restart the app and hope that the GPS comes back.
It’s not just Pokemon GO that does this. I’ve had all sorts of problems with Warframe. I used to be able to run Warframe on max settings. Now, I can hardly run it on lowest settings, and missions take ages to load. I’ll also experience FPS drops at random. You’d assume the FPS drops are because of intense combat, but no, they can happen even when I’m standing still in a closet. If anything, they are less common in combat. On top of that, I had a random blue screen of death happen while I was busy verifying my game cache, something that takes fucking forever on the best of days. Luckily, my computer seemed fine afterwards, but I had to re-verify said cache again.
And then we have work. I’m a graphic designer, and I have to deal with some… tough clients. Like clients who completely change their mind all the time and want to redo artwork, then blame me when they get the (now rather large) bill. But at the same time, things… just go wrong. I’ve had my data and my wifi fail me while talking to or meeting with clients. One time, I had to idle and lie for five minutes while my laptop refused to connect to any sort of internet, and, frankly, I looked like a fucking idiot.
Even back in the office, things can go wrong. Last week, Illustrator decided that I no longer had Helvetica installed. Helvetica is one of the most popular fonts ever, so not having it installed is a problem. I had to go and reinstall the font. Luckily I keep backups of all my fonts. But what about the time Illustrator decided that the text tool wasn’t going to work at all? I had to restart my computer for that issue to go away, which is never fun when you’re in the middle of editing a lot of text.
These problems constantly crop up. One minute I’m fine, the next, I am desperately scouring the internet to find out why X or Y isn’t working and how to fix it. And all these problems are different. There’s no real way to avoid them. I keep my computer up to date, I keep my backups, I double-check things, but problems just… happen. All the time.
It wears me down, you know? Life is tough enough as it is, with everything being very expensive, prices and rents going up and things are all very uncertain. But the little things pile on top of the big things and just make everything more miserable. I try my best to be optimistic, but come on, how optimistic can I be when the whole universe feels like it’s falling apart, and, on top of that, Windows Explorer just crashed in the middle of a random search?
Ugh. I suppose at least it’s nearly Christmas…