I went on a date with a guy and quite enjoyed it, plus he really fancied me and wanted to see me again, so I sent two short, friendly texts the following day.
He phoned me that evening and kicked off, saying he did not tolerate people texting him more than once in a day. He went on and on for almost an hour. Then, he sent me about five texts, re-iterating the importance of not "interrupting his day and putting new thoughts in his head" by texting.

I cancelled the second date.
(Porcupine, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 9:39, 6 replies)

Cutlery drawer
My girlfriend has the cutlery in the following order:

Spoons (teaspoons and dessert spoons mixed), knives, garlic crusher/pizza slicer. Then in the horizontal slot - forks.

It's hard to sleep at night.
( scoshi pretending to diet since, Thu 30 Oct 2014, 10:13, 41 replies)

Witty title
(tiresome made up story about how a certain Australian celeb-paedo smells really bad)

... so you could say that cunt Rolf reeks!
(jrd, Fri 24 Oct 2014, 16:36, 4 replies)

I know someone who always uses a teaspoon to measure out instant coffee
rather than just tipping in what they need from the jar. And they don't even change what they do if one teaspoon is of a noticealy different size to another.

In fact, I know a lot of people who do this. Pretty much everyone in fact.

Now that you mention it, I would like a lie-down.
( joefish It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks, Fri 24 Oct 2014, 14:33, 44 replies)

A Next Generation of japery
Rumour has it that the filming of the Star Trek: The Next Generation series and films were beset with practical jokery, including replacing the Captain's uniform with a red 'sacrificial' ensign's shirt. Even Patrick Stewart is alleged to have snuck out of his dressing-room marked 'Captain Picard' and into the one marked 'Commander Riker' to hide his co-star's clothes, refreshments and other personal belongings and simulate a burglary, thus showing that, with the right amount of determination, you can troll Frakes.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 31 Oct 2014, 13:35, 6 replies)

old sort-of friend
had learning difficulties and was placed on a "vulnerable" list.
ended up with a controlling bastard of a fella who only let her out of the house once a week to go shopping. she had an hour to get everything done and, if she wasn't back, he'd call the police and report her missing. due to her vulnerable status, they actually went looking for her and brought her back home to that prick.
so glad she dumped him, i had foreseen bad things if she'd stayed.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 30 Oct 2014, 16:21, 12 replies)

Probably not a sex offender
I know a guy, let's call him "Fred" because that's his actual name.

He moved to England to work in our company with two other guys, so they all grabbed a shared house together. This let them jabber in their filthy foreign lingo without bothering proper people.

Anyhoo, one day the two other lads come into work and By Jove, they were upset. Veritably whey faced and shaking they were!

It turns out that whilst they were out, Fred had tidied their laundry up. All their socks were paired and their grotty pants had all been ironed and folded neatly in their drawers.

The horror!
(csdaveuk, Wed 29 Oct 2014, 9:52, 2 replies)

Head
My father in law was a primary school head teacher and magistrate, so his control freakery hit extreme levels. Examples include:
- counting out potatoes so everyone got exactly the same number (whether you wanted them or not). He referred to this as the 'regulation number of potatoes'.
- obsessively pointing out dog crap on the pavement whenever we were within 10 m of it. I'm surprised he didn't get the family to walk in crocodile.
- timing our visits to, well, anywhere really. If he felt we had been somewhere too long he would start to huff and puff and look at his watch. Planning holidays was like a military operation.
- drinks had to be taken at particular times of day, e.g. coffee at 11am, tea at 4pm, glass of wine at 6pm on the dot. He would start to get extremely nervous if the appointed time was missed. Possibly connected to the issue of timing visits out.
- breakfast always had to be exactly the same: orange juice (to be drunk before the meal, not after), a small bowl of muesli, 2 slices of toast, tea.
- phone calls had to be planned to the millisecond. If you didn't call when you said you would he would panic. He would sit by the phone 5 minutes before the appointed time, waiting for the call.
Add to this that he was a small-minded bigot with a taste for petty bureaucracy, and you can imagine that we had a very happy friendship...
(Smale is stuffed, Tue 28 Oct 2014, 5:41, 1 reply)

American Lawyer
(Boring wording). I used to be a lawyer for well known firm, let's call it "Something & Company". One particular client was an inhouse lawyer who worked for a giant US company. We were to produce an English law contract for her as they were doing something in the UK that required our input.

The contract was produced to my usual high standard but, no, this was not acceptable. It had to be redone in a particular style, i.e. same words but presented in a different format in terms of numbering, font, etc. "OK," say I, "That's now what the UK people who read it will expect but we can accommodate you - after all the client is always right." Nine drafts later, the words remained the same. The content remained the same. The legal effectiveness remained the same. However, the document had been renumbered, re-spaced, re-sized, re-indented, reformatted for US legal paper (despite being used in the UK on A4), re-everythinged short of actually changing the words. She even insisted that the name of the firm I worked for be changed from "Something & Company" to "Somethingandcompany".

All done happily on an hourly rate of £300. Probably £10,000 in finely tuning a perfectly good document that cost (a very reasonable) £3,000 in the first place.

tl'dr: boring lawyer does boring stuff to long document at whim of control freak which costs her lots of money
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 12:37, 17 replies)

One of my pet peeves
is not being able to find the remote for the TV or the cable or the DVD player. I'll go to sit down to watch TV and have to spend a good chunk of time figuring out where the damn remotes are. Usually they end up being in the sofa cushions, but often they'll be underneath the sofa or a chair, and sometimes they'll be in another room altogether because someone carried it while going to get something from the kitchen or some such.

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable of me to find this annoying, and recently announced that I was going to get a length of wood and attach the lot of them to that, a sort of universal remote that can't be lost.

And now I'm labeled as a control freak.
(Shimrod, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 5:41, 13 replies)

I recall a long holiday drive to Salt Lake City, and back
Control Freak was driving; I was his passenger. He wasn't adventurous or daring: quite the opposite. He grew up in Chicago and learned early his urban defenses: keep the windows rolled up, the doors locked, don't talk to anyone, and, oh yeah, control of the radio is not for you. I kept pointing out the Mormons of Utah are the least menacing, most pleasant, most inoffensive people the Earth has to offer, but he wouldn't be gulled into complacency. So off we drove hundreds of paranoid miles across the magnificent empty plateaus of southern Utah, glaring suspiciously at the few, friendly, distant people we saw, until we came to the Great Salt Lake. We stared at the inland sea for a few minutes, then returned.

At the trip's end I had had enough. So, I punched him. He bounced off a bookcase, spun into me, and through no effort of his own ended up sitting on me. My friends were aghast at the inappropriateness of it all.

Strangely enough, the stress and sleeplessness of that trip, coupled with a particularly beautiful sight among the rock arches of southern Utah, provided the only genuinely religious epiphany I've ever had in my life. But you couldn't pay me to repeat the trip.
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Fri 24 Oct 2014, 15:10, 3 replies)

I have an excellent story,
But I'm only going to tell it to you once you're all sitting still... and I'd BETTER NOT HAVE ANY INTERRUPTIONS.
(eViLegion Chief Commissioner of the Scottish Lunacy Board, Fri 24 Oct 2014, 14:05, Reply)

it was my birthday
and two friends took my girlfriend and me out to dinner at a fairly posh restaurant. It looked to be a very pleasant evening, with food and wine and good company.

I had my cell phone with me- an admittedly crappy bit of work which had no vibrate mode that I ever found, and no way of silencing it when someone called. Unfortunately this was during the Bad Times in the divorce process, so I had to keep it on in case the kids called with an emergency. But if it started to ring, I had a folded napkin handy to muffle the sound to a whisper if it was a non-emergency call.

As luck would have it, of course, everyone I knew was trying to call me that night.

After the fourth or fifth call that I immediately muffled under the napkin, a guy at the table across the aisle and down one snarled "Answer your goddam phone!"

"I'm sorry," I said in my gentlest voice, "I have to keep in on in case my kids need me. I'll try to keep it quiet."

"Well then call your kids!"

"Ummm... look, I'm only keeping it on in case of an emergency. If they call I'll answer them; otherwise I'm covering it with this napkin-"

"Just answer your fucking phone!" he yelled.

The woman next to him and the couple across from them were looking increasingly uncomfortable through this. I tried again to apologize and explain, but he kept getting louder and angrier. His friends looked like they were ready to crawl away under the tables, and his woman was telling him loudly to shut up. My friends tried to intervene, but he started in on them as well.

Finally I used my most stentorian Brian Blessed voice, the drill sergeant tone that makes people jump, and announced, "Sir, you are drunk. Please take your friends' advice and quiet down." I said this with the most scorn I could muster.

The result was immediate, of course. He surged to his feet and his friends grabbed him and dragged him out the door, bellowing as he went.

The waitress approached with a look of terror in her eyes. "Sir, I'm so sorry! We could hear it all the way up at the front!"

I smiled up at her. "No worries. You had nothing to do with it. We're all fine."

She looked after the vanished group. "They were out at the bar for a couple of hours before their table was ready. And they had just opened a $270 bottle of wine, too."

I sat up. "They did? Well, it shouldn't be wasted, should it? Pass it on over!"

She glanced around to make sure no one was looking, then grabbed the bottle and handed it to me. She then got me a fresh glass and scurried off.

My friends were still buzzing with adrenaline. "I'm so sorry that this happened on your birthday!" she exclaimed, her cheeks red.

I laughed. "Why? Are you kidding? That was great! Look- he was a drunken blustering bully, right? Not only did I publicly tell him off and get his friends to drag him out of here, but I also made sure that he's not gonna get laid for about a month. And now I'm drinking his wine besides!"

And at the end of the meal the manager came and apologized, and comped us our meal. Result, mothafukka.
(dozers, do fuck off ur a nob m8, Sat 1 Nov 2014, 17:37, 10 replies)

half a show
i can't watch telly at my mother's house. she has an iron grip on the remote control and feels the need to switch to another channel while the ads are on, thus making you miss part of the show you were originally watching and getting you interested in the second show, just to turn it over again. even my dad isn't allowed to complain or touch the remote without getting called a baldy cunt.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 30 Oct 2014, 15:41, 5 replies)

Well this escalated slowly.

(SlantedScience, Thu 30 Oct 2014, 1:44, 2 replies)

Roll-up cig prob
I've got into the habit of making roll-up cigarettes, and have run out of papers. I only use special imported papers from Bolivia and my usual supplier is having problems with his supplier. He won't be able to get any more in until next weekend!

So I... can't roll for a week.
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Sat 25 Oct 2014, 11:00, 10 replies)