As a celebrated turn coat and hypocrite, my collection of those products that have been designed in California by Apple is ample. I have an iPhone (4s), an iPad (3), an iMac (2011), Apple TV and Airport Express. The phone and tablet are my go to devices for day to day web browsing, pissing about on social media, accessing music, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I use an electronic diary at work, where our IT system is still firmly embedded in 2003; clinging on to Windows XP. But what with exchange servers and clever shenanigans, my work and home diaries merge across all platforms. I’ll stick something into my diary on my phone and it pops up in my work calendar, on my iPad and in the diary on my computer at home. I’ll arrange a meeting with colleagues and tell them, “OK, that’s in my diary” and then they have to do it, they can’t help themselves… they send me a calendar invitation, which results in this:

The red notification dot of doom.

Why do they have to do this when I’ve already told them that I’ve put it in my diary? Don’t they realise that, no matter how many times I accept their fucking invitation, the red dot of doom is almost impossible to get rid of? Worse still, I get these invititions from people when they know I’m on annual leave. It’s like being hunted by an overzealous pack of rabid administrators.

They’ve obviously been on the “Making the most of Outlook” course, aka “How to really piss people off with the click of a mouse button”. What’s evident from one particular culprit is that the “Making most of Outlook” course clearly doesn’t contain is a section entitled “Turning up to the meetings that you’ve invited loads of people to”. It’s no good adding a note to the invitation that asks attendees to “please come and get me if I don’t show up”, it’s kind of a given that when you arrange a meeting, you turn up.

Minor irritations
Anyway, life must be pretty good when your worst gripe is a red dot on one of your mobile phone application icons.

What is quite annoying is the realisation that your little iPad keyboard doesn’t work properly with a number of applications that have been upgraded recently. I have left-right cursor movement, but not up-down. The only way to resolve this will be to get another Apple product, probably a MacBook Air or something. Or maybe I should just shrug my shoulders and move on.

In reference to “moving on”, my tendency towards flying into road rage is now being affected by the increase in traffic congestion that’s usual for this time of year. All motorists are guilty of contributing to traffic congestion just by being out on the road, but some seem hell bent on making the situation worse by their sheer fuckwittedness. Here are just a few pointers to help keep the traffic moving:

Of course, none of these thing really matter that much in the grand scheme of things and they all stem from self-annoyance because I fail to leave the house before the traffic starts to build up in the morning. There’s not much I can do about dimwitted drivers, but I can try to be on the road when there are fewer of them around. That just leaves the minor problem of what to do about the calendar invite obsessives. I might have to arrange for their fingers to be broken.