Nobody’s perfect. Even the most socially adept person is guilty of committing a faux pas. Whether it’s not giving your seat away on the bus to someone who needs it or tipping the bare minimum on a meal, we do many things daily that others find annoying. Let’s check them out.
1. Being on your phone when someone is talking to you.
We’re all undoubtedly guilty of this. You go out for breakfast with your partner, and getting your meal takes longer than usual. You’re hungry, and your partner is discussing work with you, which is something they’ve discussed lately. You can’t help but check your messages and see if you’ve got any new emails. It’s annoying, but it’s all too common.
2. Not minimizing your background activity.
During COVID, many of us had to work from home, which meant we had to do work meetings via Zoom. If this was you, you had to find a quiet corner of the house, away from the kids. As time passed, you might have gotten lazy about finding a distraction-free zone, preferring to set up your meeting at the breakfast bar. Other meeting members would complain about how you always had background noise when they were trying to talk to you, like the vacuum or dishwasher.
3. Overdoing the personal scent.
Are you someone who loves wearing perfume or cologne? Perhaps this is the first thing you apply when you get out of the shower. You’ve found your perfect match and love smelling like it—even for mundane tasks like going to the grocery store. However, you might be guilty of wearing too much of it. If you get funny looks in the frozen section or a colleague asks what that smell is when they enter your office, that’s a sign.
4. Using up a seat for your bag.
This one is something we’re all guilty of, including you. You get on a train or a bus, and you can’t fit your bag at your feet. Without thinking, you place it on the seat beside you and start to relax. You don’t realize that someone might need to sit there, and you’re sending a message to anyone in need that it’s off-limits.
5. Humble bragging.
Thanks to showing off your life online, humble bragging is easy to do. It’s when you want to boast to others around you without being too obvious (but it’s totally obvious). The irony is that it comes off cringy, and most people pick up on your intention. For example, you might say, “It’s so annoying—our house is so big that I just can’t clean it all myself; I’ve got to hire a cleaner.”
6. Taking up the entire escalator.
There’s much more to travel etiquette than meets the eye, from trains and planes to the humble escalator. If you live in the city, you probably use escalators a lot, which means you’re most likely guilty of not standing to the side to let people pass. Instead, you stand in the middle, which means people in a hurry can’t get past you and must wait until you get off.
7. Forgetting your manners.
Your parents probably told you to chew with your mouth closed and not put your elbows on the table when you were growing up, and they probably reminded you to say “please” and “thank you.” However, even the best of us forget our manners from time to time. Perhaps you’ve been at a restaurant on a date, and instead of saying to the waiter, “Please may I have…” you’ve said, “Can I get…”
8. Forgetting to hold the door open.
It’s a small thing, but it’s annoying. You’re in a building, and you’re walking out. It’s busy, and there are people behind you. You open the front door but forget to hold it open for the person behind you. As a result, it swings shut, and they have to open it themselves. Even if it’s a mindless mistake, it’s still annoying.
9. Singing too loudly.
Everyone loves a bit of car karaoke, especially with friends on a road trip. You know the scenario—your favorite song comes on, and even though you can’t sing that great, you’re with your close friends and know they don’t care. However, you sing so loud that you drown out everyone else’s singing and the song itself.
10. Not taking your shopping cart back.
This is another easy thing to do but pretty frustrating for the person affected. You’ve just finished packing your groceries in the trunk, and you know you’ve only got 10 minutes to get across town to pick up the kids from school. Instead of returning your shopping cart, you leave it at the nearest curb. This saves you time but inconveniences the grocery store worker who has to collect it.
11. Putting an empty container back in the fridge.
We’re all guilty of this—mainly because we’re too lazy to rinse the container and put it in the dishwasher or recycle it. You think for a second that you should do the right thing, but then you think about all the other things you should be doing instead and promise you’ll do it later. Next thing you know, your partner asks you why there’s an empty container in the fridge.
12. Returning something to the wrong shelf.
This is, again, one of those annoying things you’re probably guilty of when you’re in a grocery or department store. It’s easy to do because you don’t see how it negatively affects them immediately, but it’s still annoying at best. You’ve gotten to the checkout only to realize that you didn’t want the yogurt after all, so instead of going back to the dairy aisle, you stick it between the Doritos and Lays near the checkout.
14. Talking through a movie.
You’ve probably experienced this from both sides. You’ve likely been in a situation where you’re watching an interesting movie, and you can’t help but talk about it with your partner. You’ve probably also been in a film when someone else has been talking away, and you had to tell them to be quiet.
15. Not replacing the toilet paper.
This is another annoying domestic thing that probably drives your partner crazy. Whenever the toilet roll is out, you leave the job for the next person instead of going to the closet to get a new one. You do this mainly because the closet is so far away, but you know that you’d be annoyed if your partner did this to you.
