The Gripe Report: Emojis, The Sanctity Of Order Pick-Up Spots, Mail Rooms

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It’s Friday, which means it’s as good a time as any to get your gripe on, and what better place to do that than in with the entire internet’s preeminent home for bitchin’ and moanin’, the one and only Gripe Report.

I’m your fearless, gripe-having leader, Matt Reigle and I hope you’ve had a great week… not too great thought. We need stuff to complain about/

Got a gripe? Of course, you do! Send it in: mattreigleoutkick@gmail.com

I don’t mean to brag, but I live in an apartment complex. There are certainly pros and cons to this kind of arrangement. 

On one hand, it is nice to just call in the maintenance man whenever something goes wrong, even something minor. Although, it is a little immasculating to have a dude come into your place and change a light bulb for you like you’re an incapable doofus, but hey, it’s what you’re paying for.

They also take care of the landscaping, which, again, is a double-edged sword. It’s nice to have that taken care of, but sometimes I would like to get behind a push mower and lay some stripes on a Thursday night. 

But the problem I’ve got stems from something the grounds crew they hire does, or, perhaps more accurately, doesn’t do. 

Every couple of months, the landscapers spray pesticides all over the grass. I feel like their other issues that could use tending to — kids nearly getting hit by cars in the parking lot because of how they recklessly ride all over the parking in the dark; perhaps the dude who plugs into the neighboring building so he can get some free juice for his Volvo — but I guess massacring bugs in their own domain is fine.

Of course, one of the things with pesticides is you don’t want to get it on you, and you definitely don’t want your dog ingesting it. So, they put little warning signs out that tell even the dumbest, most illiterate person not to walk Fido in that area because there’s poison on the grass.

But here’s the rub: they never come back and remove these signs.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the heads up. I like my dog. I would prefer to not have him get sick on insect killer. 

But I don’t like being held hostage by signs that are only still there because someone was too lazy to come back and yoink them all out of the ground so that me and my French bulldog Carl (Hi, Carl! Whosagoodboy? WHOOOOsagoodboy!) know we have the all clear to hit the grass again.

Is it a first-world gripe? Sure, but, as we all know here at The Gripe Report, the best ones often are. 

Emojis In Professional Correspondence

Gripe Report veteran Otis is checking in this week with a gripe that I think we’ll all be simpatico on, but I don’t hear talked about nearly enough:

Okay, here is one, and I know I am going to be in the majority in this one.    Will grown men STOP putting emojis in business emails for crying out loud?   I run a small business and I am setting up a project so going back and forth setting up a new vendor.   I finally got all the paperwork back to him and his reply?    “Sounds Great!….” followed with an emoji smiley face of all things.    First, you make me do all this paperwork for a relatively small transaction and then feel the need to stick the landing with an emoji?   In retrospect, I wish I had gotten over my initial annoyance and sent back the middle finger emoji.    

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It is wild what we’ve become as a society. It’s one thing to goof around with emojis with your co-workers. Who hasn’t sent a work pal a pile of poop emoji as a goof?!

But it’s the external communique where people seem to be playing it way too fast and loose with the emojis.

I know I’m 100% with Otis. If I was trying to do business with someone, I don’t think I want them mudding the waters with emojis. At least not unless we’re going to be super literal with them. Like, if I take my car into the shop and the mechanic tries to upsell me on stuff I don’t need, I would appreciate him tacking this on at the end: 🤑

I’d appreciate the honesty, and respectfully decline his suggestion to buy the winterization package considering I live in Florida.

But for the most part, leave emojis for your friends and family.

Otherwise, I fear that someday we’ll reach a point when you’ll go to a doctor’s office and they’ll sit you down to discuss an important, potentially life-altering screening, slide a paper in front of you with the results, and a quick scan of it reveals that the results are not good.

But how do you know that? Because the results read like this: 🤒😵☠️

People Who Won’t Return Carts Or Respect The Order Pick-Up Parking Spots

Another one of our great Gripe Report vets has something for us this week.

Take it away, Mike!:

People who can’t return the cart frost me. 

My wife will put in a grocery order at Walmart, and it’s my job to pick up and bring it home. Almost every trip I’ll see someone park in a pick-up space and then head off into the store. Now, granted there are 30 some spaces, and I usually only see about 10-12 being used most times.

That’s beside the point.  

A few times I’ve seen people come out of the store, load the car, and leave the cart right there. C’mon people, the cart corral is 20 feet away. 

…

I loathe people who leave carts behind. It’s the absolute laziest thing you could possibly do. 

The only thing I like is that it’s like a Bat Signal that lets you know someone is a raging, narcissistic douche.

So, in that sense, I do appreciate it.

Even wilder is leaving the cart in a parking spot, so now, you’re inconveniencing people on multiple fronts. 

I also wanted to touch on something else Mike mentioned and that is the way people don’t respect the order-pickup spots. I know they tend to give prime real estate to the people who are picking up an order, and I can see why that may not sit well with people.

However, by eating up order-pickup spots you’re just causing problems for those who are following the rules set forth by the store.

I know there’s really no penalty for taking one of those spots. I don’t think anyone is going to get towed for taking an order pick-up spot and then doing their own shopping (although, I’d love to see it happen). But to me — like the people who won’t return carts — it speaks to the ongoing breakdown of society and people being unwilling to just follow rules because that’s how life works sometimes, even if it means you have to park six yards farther away from the front of the store than you had wanted.

People Who Won’t Grab Their Black Friday/Cyber Monday Purchases Out Of Communal Mailrooms

I’ll close us out this week. 

In the last edition of The Gripe Report, we talked about some Thanksgiving gripes, and I lamented the end of Black Friday as we knew it. 

Sure, there’s no trampling, but you can order yourself some cheap pans while you’re not even wearing pants.  

But the convenience gave way to a new gripe I hadn’t considered.

My place has a mailroom for packages. It’s just a big room with shelves designating different buildings in the complex. It’s a simple system, but most delivery drivers still can’t seem to figure it out.

Because shopping on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is so easy — I swear, I had things arrive without realizing I ordered them and I hadn’t even been drinking — there’s a deluge of cardboard boxes. 

You’d think if someone orders something, they’d be excited to pick it up, but not where I live. Nope, people like to treat the mailroom like their own miniature warehouse, where boxes stay piled and stored for weeks. 

Especially this time of year, this makes it tough to find whatever it is you ordered because some idiot bought a cheap set of barstools on Cyber Monday, but can’t be bothered to pick up the box. That means very handsome funny guys like myself have to climb over their crap to try to track down the pack of guitar strings they bought.

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That’s it for this edition of The Gripe Report!

We’ll be back in session next week, but in the meantime, be sure to send in your gripes!: mattreigleoutkick@gmail.com