Things That Could Push Me Over the Edge

Introduction

To begin, I want to assure you that I’m a pretty even-keeled sort, and although in my youth I had quite a temper—my brothers referred to my not-infrequent rages as “fire-ups”—I am very good at keeping it together these days. Still, I know that everyone has a breaking point. Probably it would take the perfect storm of annoyances to push me over the edge, not just a single irritant (such as the incessant call of the whip-poor-will in James Thurber’s eponymous story). The purpose of this post is to give anthropologists, biographers, or police detectives some good leads if somebody, someday, seeks to figure out why a calm, easygoing person like me actually went berserk. So here’s a list of the kinds of things that could, if chained together under the right circumstances, finally push me too far.

Anything involving a fitted sheet

Could it possibly be that in 2026 nobody has improved on the weirdly quasi-rectangular, never-correctly-sized, inexpertly-elasticized fitted sheet? This product’s job is just not that complicated: to stay put on a mattress. Sometimes fitted sheets actually fit, and thus recede into the background, but so often they misbehave: for example, a corner peels away, so you wake up with your sweating skin plastered against the mattress, perhaps imprinted with its weird texture. And where fitted sheets really drive me nuts is when they’re not on the bed. Unlike a top sheet, they’re impossible to fold … no matter how precisely you try to line up the edges, you just end up practically wadding the thing into a ball. And then when you try to mount it on your mattress, you can’t get it oriented—it it behaves like pizza dough you fail to stretch into a disc, only you’re trying for a rectangle. Finally you find the little seams that (if you’re lucky) delineate these edges, and then you’ve got the sheet covering most of the mattress, but that final corner is either way too tight, so you can’t tug it far enough down, or it’s too loose, and you have all this slack to fold under. Every time I deal with a fitted sheet, I almost want to just give up and go sleep on the couch with a sleeping bag.

Stuff stuck in my teeth

I should only eat nuts at home where I have a gum stimulator tool. Otherwise I have all this shrapnel in my teeth I can’t work free, and my tongue gets tired and sore. When this happens on a hike I’ll sometimes pull a thin twig off a tree to use as a toothpick, in which case my wife warns me the twig is poisonous. (The worst part of this scenario is that she actually knows what she’s talking about.) But things get really bad when some sneaky bit of food gets stuck so badly right between two teeth that that it actually hurts. In this case, a toothpick doesn’t always help. In fact, the worst case scenario is that either a toothpick actually breaks in there, compounding the problem, or a piece of dental floss shreds in between the teeth. At such moments life seems literally hopeless.

And speaking of dental floss, even it doesn’t shred, trying to throw away a strand of it can seem futile. I pop the trash can lid up, try to drop the strand in, and it clings to my fingers, or misses the can, or only half of it goes in so it dangles over the side, or—worst case—it falls on the floor and (because I’m usually so exhausted at bedtime) I have trouble even finding it. Can’t Dyson create some kind of Floss-Vac, so that when I’m done flossing I can just press a button and have the floss ripped from my fingers and sucked into a vortex where I never need to think about it again?

Janky POS at gas station

Paying at the gas pump should not be complicated. Every company designing this point of sale interface should just copy an existing design that works. And yet the Service Station Industrial Complex seems to need to innovate. Sometimes it’s loud video ads or byzantine car wash options, or else it’s half a dozen loyalty card options. If I try to use my Safeway card and don’t have any award points, it sometimes hoses the whole transaction; other times, it weirdly gives me the Chevron member discount (which is a mistake, but hey, I’ll take it!). This confusion is only slightly annoying, but what kills me is when the POS wants me to pre-select something. The other day an Arco POS display said, “Enter amount.” Amount of what? Gas, or money? I guessed and put in “6,” figuring consumers care mainly about how many gallons we need, vs. the unpleasant matter of how much we’re forced to pay. Well, I guessed wrong and the pump gave me $6 worth of gas … a little over a gallon, which is of course nearly worthless. But I was like, okay, fine, it wants a dollar figure. So I tried again and put in a generous number, which should have worked, except that after pumping for like 30 seconds the POS realized, hey, this same card was used twice at this pump—an obvious sign of fraud! Stop the fueling! So I got like another half-gallon, plus it locked up my credit card, so I had to call my bank. Amazingly, this isn’t the first time such a thing has happened. Whoever designed this interface should be force-fed gasoline through a beer bong.

Car blasting horn at cyclist

Look, I understand that when I am out bicycling, sharing the road with cars, occasionally a driver will want to make sure I’m aware of his car bearing down on me. A little toot of the horn from, say, 30 feet away is completely appropriate. But I also encounter motorists who wait until they’re five feet from me and then blast the horn. It’s not like I didn’t know they were there, but that unexpected loud blast can just about make me jump out of my skin. The horn is supposed to be for safety; why this need to weaponize it? When this happens, I generally flip the driver the bird. This response might seem strange to you: I mean, what if the driver overreacts? Well, think about it: what’s he gonna do, come after me? He’s ahead of me! If he screeches to a halt, I’ll ride right past. If he waits for me at the next intersection and wants to fight, I’m all for it. After all, I’ll be the only combatant in a helmet.

The last time this happened, a couple weeks ago, I flipped off the driver, and then my riding buddy said, “There were kids in that car.” I grasped his point immediately: I had lucked out! Consider: the driver is an asshole; his young kids know it; and now I’ve taught them an important gesture they can make to their dad on a regular basis. I only wish I could give them a better tutorial, emphasizing that the ring and index fingers don’t curl all the way in, but are positioned such that their knuckles line up with that of the bird finger. But I’m sure those kids will refine their technique over time.

Resurfacing earworm

I am cursed with the ability to remember rock songs in great detail, whether I like them or not. Obviously in the case of a band I love, like Pink Floyd, it’s natural I’d remember every word of every song, along with all the instrumentals—but also intact are all these songs I never even meant to listen to but encountered secondhand because they got a lot of radio play. This means I also know all the lyrics to, say, “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, even though I only liked the song briefly, when I was like seven. Mercifully, lots of the  music from my youth has failed to pass the test of time and, due to zero airplay, finally fades from memory.

Until it comes back. And this, alas, can happen at any time, for no reason. Some minor song like “One Step Ahead of You” by Split Enz will suddenly pop back into my head, and I’ll be like gosh, that’s strange, but then it’s kind of understandable that one would resurface because “one step ahead of you” is a household phrase. But occasionally a song I always despised, and which hasn’t been played on any Bay Area station in decades, and has no reason to be remembered, will pop into my head and then become the soundtrack to my latest anxiety dream, so I hear it all night as I sleep. Most recently the offending song was “Hair of the Dog” by Nazareth. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s the song whose chorus (which is like 90% of the song) goes, “Now you’re messing with a / Son of a bitch!” Why does my brain do this to me? Am I punishing myself for something?

Modern light bulbs

I understand the benefit of modern LED light bulbs: they use like a tenth of the energy of traditional incandescent bulbs. And I’m all for saving the planet, of course. I like to run my lights on a dimmer (which also conserves energy) … but it’s strictly hit or miss how the new bulbs will behave. The same make and model might work this week but not next. How they fail varies quite a bit. The LED bulbs designed for above my stovetop don’t do a damn thing. (I found some non-LED ones on Amazon but they refused to ship them to California due to state law; I had to have like 20 of them shipped to my mom’s place in Oregon.) Other LED bulbs seem to work on the dimmer but occasionally, spontaneously they’ll start flickering like crazy, causing seizures in my epileptic houseguests. Or they’ll just occasionally stop working until I futz with the switch a bunch of times. Completely maddening.

The other issue is, even though these modern bulbs barely use any energy, I can’t get a bright enough bulb for the bathroom. When I shave, I want that bathroom lit up like an operating theatre (and the rest of the time it’s on a dimmer, remember)? But all these LED bulbs max out at some piddly lumen number.

Does your neighborhood feature people leaving totally cool stuff out in their driveways for anyone to take? Sometimes it’s crap, like worn-out, depressingly faded or dirty toys, or waterlogged books. But more of the time it’s great stuff … we once got a beautiful drafting desk, and another time some elegant drinking glasses, and once (as celebrated here) we found a sweet toaster. But perhaps the most satisfying item ever was a box (in front of this old geezer’s house) of old-school incandescent bulbs. I couldn’t believe my luck! I mean, these you cannot buy. It’ll be a sad day when they finally burn out. Just like me I suppose.

People who can’t use calendar software

Among workplace productivity applications, perhaps the most useful is the shared calendar. How did we ever set up meetings before we could instantly see what day and time works for all six attendees? It’s great! Which makes it extra frustrating when colleagues—whom I have no option to avoid having meetings with—choose not to participate. They break the whole system. You go to set up a meeting and their schedule looks like Tetris—they’re triple- or quadruple-booked all day, every day, for the next five years. How many of these meetings are bogus? Answer: all but (possibly) one.

And if you’re attending a meeting, accept the invite! Don’t keep me waiting! I mean, what’s the problem … are you holding out for a better offer? Just keeping your options open? Look, if you don’t accept, I’m either going to have to hassle you, or reschedule, because believe me, I wouldn’t invite you in the first place if you weren’t absolutely necessary to the discussion. Chances are I don’t even like you.

If I were a manager, I would tell my employees, “If I ever see you double-booked on your calendar, you’re fired.” (You might think this would be frowned upon by leadership but actually, I’d be a hero, just for finding a novel way to get rid of more employees.)

Malfunctioning smoke alarm

Is there anything worse than being awakened in the middle of the night by a shrieking smoke alarm? Not only are you jumping out of bed, but you’re legitimately alarmed, especially because so many of these don’t only detect smoke (which at least you can smell) but carbon monoxide (which could silently kill your whole family). So you’re trying to figure out if you need to evacuate the house or just silence the damn thing. And half the time the “Silence” button doesn’t work. After all, the thing is malfunctioning.

It was bad enough when all you had to do was take out the battery—but now there are these factory-sealed models where you can’t. So you have to bury the damn thing like the telltale heart, smothering it in a clothes drawer so you don’t have to hear it anymore.

Bonus points: a certain model I seem to have a weakness for buying has a switch on it called “Deactivate.” It’s so tempting to throw this switch, except you can never go back. I mean, what’s the difference between using this switch and just smashing the alarm with a hammer?

I actually got the manufacturer to warranty a unit recently. The support rep asked what happened. I said that it wouldn’t stop alarming, no matter how many times I pressed “Silence,” and then finally it went silent but now won’t respond to the “Test” button. (I confess I left out the part where I repeatedly beat the alarm with my fist and then threw it on the floor.)

I was traveling recently and my daughter, who was visiting (or I guess technically housesitting since my wife and I weren’t there) called to report a smoke alarm wouldn’t shut up. Before I had a chance to actually advise her, she said, “Oh, wait, here’s a ‘Deactivate’ button!” Before I could stop her she’d thrown the switch. “Thanks a lot, “ I snarled. “You just bricked it.” Then I felt like a jerk, which hurt especially bad because I know it’s true.

Synthesis

I just realized what’s probably going to push me over the edge one day: I’ll be asleep, having an anxiety dream, with “Rock Me Amadeus” playing on infinite loop in my head, and then the smoke alarm will go off, and it won’t shut up, and in my frenzied attempt to smother it I’ll end up trying to wrap it in a fitted sheet!

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From the Archives - How a Camp Stove Almost Cost Me My Marriage

Introduction

It goes without saying that every obstacle thrown at us presents a litmus test of our value as a human being. If you can’t meet every challenge with grace and aplomb, they might as well take you out with the trash. With that in mind, I offer this true story from my archives. It takes place two days into an 8-month bicycle tour (and was written a week or two later).

Note: I hope it’s obvious I was kidding just now.

How a Camp Stove Almost Cost Me My Marriage - March 1994

Before setting off for a trans-continental bicycle tour, all the guidebooks warn us, you must begin a daily training regimen. One book told the sad story of a man who planned a long bicycle tour in Europe, but started off too quickly and “ruined his knees.” His ended doing a moped tour instead. Hardly a glorious enterprise, especially when you consider the French word for moped: mobylette. Pathetic. With this cautionary tale in mind, my fiancée and I are starting out slow.

Of course, along the way we’re learning how to not get along. Prior to the last couple of weeks, we’d really never bickered about anything. It was one of those really placid romances totally devoid of passionate fights, of bathing each other’s hands in tears, of rending our clothes, of screaming “I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!” and then getting to take it all back later in a wonderful reconciliation. We never made our friends feel important by soliciting their advice on matters of the heart. We never balanced daringly on the edge of deciding to “see other people for a while.” Everything has been really easy, and why wouldn’t it be? We’re young, unburdened, and had been leading a luxurious life in the paradise of San Francisco, eating at the best restaurants in the world, taking long walks in the gorgeous upscale neighborhoods, and saving all of our bad moods for our co-workers.

But now, what with the hardships of the elements, the fatigue of pedaling a loaded bicycle all day every day, and above all the tedium of the myriad logistical chores we now face daily—packing up the panniers, cleaning dishes without a sink, trying to dry out a rain-soaked tent & ground cloth, trying to fold the map, et cetera—we’re both pretty grouchy. For example, I’ll be impatient to load everything in the morning, so I’ll gripe when my fiancée has to dig back into one of her panniers to get the toothpaste, having realized she forgot to brush. Then, she’ll get impatient when we’re on the road and I’m digging through a pannier for the compass since I’m uncertain that we’re going in the right direction, and kind of want the security-blanket feel of having a compass handy. (When you’re carrying your world around in panniers, you’re always digging around for something, and out of eight panniers total, it’s almost impossible to find anything. We were lucky to dig the camera out in time to get a photo of a lizard. Preparing for the photo of the banana slug was much less frantic—we could’ve painted its portrait.)

So, since we’re both perpetually crabby now, we’ve got plenty of opportunity to practice those fair-fighting skills that so far we’d had no need for. Our partnership is being tested.

Exhibit A: my first engagement with our new camp stove. Weighing in at under 1.5 pounds, and capable of burning white gas, kerosene, diesel, unleaded, jet fuel, and probably liquid oxygen (what couldn’t burn liquid oxygen?), the MSR XGK II stove seems perfect. It has great features, was recommended highly, and is the most expensive stove on the market. I had to have it. So I bought it, threw it in the pile of “trip stuff” that seemed to grow as fast as the newspapers in the recycle bin, and then didn’t look at it until it was time to actually use it. The price tags were still on it, even.

That’s okay, I thought; a big, goofy, jolly guy I know who wears lots of plaid flannel shirts and loves the great outdoors told me, “Working the XGK II is a cinch. It’s way easier than the instructions say.” This was a relief, since the instructions run eight pages and seem to have been pretty hastily produced, without a lot of proofreading.

There are lots of confusing bits, such as “Use kerosene and only in a ventilated area.” If taken literally, of course, this defies the very selling point that sold me on this stove: that it would burn anything. I imagine that the intended meaning was, “If you use kerosene, you should have adequate ventilation.” But this too is problematic, since any idiot knows you should use adequate ventilation wherever you run a stove on anything, so it won’t burn your tent down or use up all the available oxygen so you keel over and die. More enigmatic was the inexplicable blank space in the instructions that ran for a couple lines after this stipulation, as though further instruction had been wited-out.

[Note: I have just learned, via this random blog post from which I got the above photo, that it was indeed Wite-Out obscuring two lines of text. The obscured text originally said, “… should weather conditions necessitate the use of the stove inside a tent.” My fellow blogger’s instructions had been altered with a Magic Marker instead, perhaps because his were printed on glossier paper.]

Another problem was that the instructions given are for the XGK model, not the XGK II. A little scrap of paper was enclosed explaining the substitution of instructions, but not explaining how to operate the stove that I had actually purchased. The main difference between the two stoves seems to be that my stove doesn’t have a knob that strikes a flint, igniting the fuel. Okay, fine: where it says to spin the knob, I won’t. (I mean, I can’t. There’s no knob.) But how, then, do I light this stove? Obviously, I would need to use a match: but do I need to take any extra precautions, so that I don’t light my hand on fire? The instructions do mention the “Stop, Drop, & Roll” method of extinguishing yourself, but I wouldn’t mind beginning my safety program at an earlier step.

These are minor points, however. I was not worried about my ability to get the stove working. It’s a simple mechanical device, nothing more. We all know the exceedingly limited potential for any such device to cause frustration. (If the last sentence did not strike you as ironic, by the way, then you are abnormal, and should be building model airplanes or something instead of reading fine literature like this.)

Well, I hooked everything up, turned the vapor control valve knob, and waited for “about a teaspoon of fuel to collect near the jet.” This process made me apprehensive since the schematic diagram of the stove, while pointing out all the obvious pieces such as “fuel container” and “wind screen,” neglected to point out the jet. No matter how long I looked at the picture, the “jet” label just never materialized.

I figured I would just watch very carefully for the jet, with a water bottle nearby so that if the jet turned out to be a centimeter from my eye, I could flush it out. Well, the fuel never really collected anywhere. So I dribbled gas on the place where I hoped the jet was, lit (with great effort) a (scarcely lightable) waterproof match, held my breath, and lit the stove.

The stove seemed to light, but it was impossible to be sure. It made a terrible gasping, wheezing noise; produced a small, orange flame; created a small amount of heat; in short, behaved in such as way as to create an utter mystery: was it not lit properly and in need of tweaking, or was it performing at 100% of its capabilities as a perfectly shitty stove? I realized at this moment that the guy who’d said, “It’s way easier than the instructions say” was probably lying, so that I’d look back on his words and think him some kind of genius. It’s a simple social trick, available to anybody with a total disregard for the truth.

According to a test I took in a high school Health class, I have a “Type-A Personality.” This means that I am a hothead and control freak; am headed for an ulcer; am a pain in the ass to get along with; and will suffer high blood pressure. The recommended remedy for this personality was a daily regimen of being put in a dimly lit room with pastel walls, where I would lie on a suede couch with a cold compress over my eyes and listen to New Age music. Since I have failed to implement this protocol (though I did get a massage once), conventional wisdom has it that I’m doomed to have every little annoying glitch in my life build up inside me while my face reddens, my blood pressure building up higher and higher, until I ultimately explode, shattering my skull from within and spattering innocent women and children with red pulp.

But I escape this fate through my own method of coping: I share. I make my problem everybody else’s too, so that by comparison, I am one of the less miserable people around. I vent, in other words, which is different from whining, griping, and complaining in that it is an accepted method of dealing with stress, like beating on an inflatable dummy with a Wiffle bat. But I don’t even need the bat; like Caliban, I use foul language to release my ire.

As I fumed over the stove, my need to emote increased significantly when I noticed my betrothed doing me the disservice of simply not caring about the stove. She sat there and read a novel, like nothing was wrong. Every so often she asked an innocent question like “Should I be smelling gas fumes?” to which the obvious answer is “NO, YOU SHOULDN’T BE SMELLING GAS FUMES, YOU SHOULD BE DRINKING HOT COCOA THAT YOUR FIANCÉ HEATED UP FOR YOU!”

Of course, venting shouldn’t get personal, so I spoke only to the stove. Meanwhile, I tried to be more rational about solving the problem I faced. For example, I considered using an alternate fuel, like firewood thrust into the stove at high velocity. But the stove wasn’t the actual root of the problem: the real problem was me, or more specifically my stupidity. I cursed myself for not having tested the stove earlier, back when I could have gotten help or taken it back to REI. Too late now … the receipt is either in Ashland, Oregon with most of my stuff, or in Sacramento with the rest of my stuff. Or I threw it away.

As time dragged on and the stove did seem to stay lit, I had to wonder if—notwithstanding the gasping, choking sound it was making—it might in fact be working properly? The answer was, how should I know? I’d never seen an XGK II in use in my life! So, I decided to compare my stove’s performance to the statistical results given in the product literature. Finally, something objective to hitch my poor brain to.

Well, the specifications say that the XGK II will boil water in 3.4 minutes. I looked at the fine print to find out what conditions they assumed. Sea level, starting water temperature of 70 degrees, and white gas as the fuel … okay, that’s all fine. But how much water? A teaspoon? A gallon? The specs didn’t say. So, after failing to bring a quart of water to a boil in forty minutes, I decided the stove was as crippled as it sounded.

Furious, I vented my findings to my fiancée, who was still kicking back with her novel. “Just blow it off,” she said. “We can eat something else.” Unspoken subtext: “Just give up, since you’re obviously incompetent and worthless. Why continue the struggle when you’re obviously no smarter than a baitfish? I have no faith in you … why do you continue to pretend you’ll eventually succeed?”

The problem with this method of undermining my self esteem was that it was so passive. If she’d outright accused me of being lame, I could have monunted a defense, perhaps challenged her to fix the stove herself, etc. Damn it, when I’m overreacting, I want the company of somebody at least as irrational and heated as I am! The downright sensibility of her statement infuriated me (particularly as it gradually dawned on me that her castigation was probably all in my head).

I decided to start over from scratch. I blew out the flame, completely dismantled the stove, inventoried all the components, figured out which piece had to be the jet (it’s smaller than a pencil eraser, by the way), took apart the fuel pump, cleaned a little ball that is a part of the check valve system, completely shined, polished, and praised every little piece, reassembled the whole thing, figured out how it worked, and now it runs like a top (though it’s still surprisingly loud). My stove now can actually boil water, in my lifetime. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the process (which lasted several hours) involved quite a bit of that therapeutic venting, and by the end my wife-to-be had decided that I must be angry at her, since surely nobody could get that angry at an inanimate object, or at himself, for that long. I exonerated her by explaining how the stove was a symbol of my ascent into manhood, and that childhood camping experiences in which I was denied the opportunity to even operate a stove, much less fix it, had set the stage for an inevitable camp stove crisis with my entire ego hanging in the balance. We established that the future of our relationship was not at stake, especially since I did eventually get the stove to work.

Amazingly, it appeared that, notwithstanding my embarrassing display of anger and frustration, and my admission of the worst kind of maleness, this woman somehow still wanted to marry me.

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