username.exe

Aaarrgghhhh!

joto

It's tiresome when the background music on movies or tv programmes is so loud it overwhelms the speech and makes it hard to listen to, sometimes.

Yorkieabroad

I'm NOT casting aspersions on your stage of life, but I found that got progressively worse as I approached my half century....adding a soundbar to the TV I watch most considerably improved the situation. Thank goodness for Tivo (or any other dvr) so we can easily berdoop it back a few seconds to listen again....

mikelincs

+1

username.exe

When you're listening to music on shuffle and you get the last track on an album... and then nothing for 10 minutes.

Because there's a hidden song at the end that's shite anyway.

Bahtatboy

One of the benefits of living in foreign, non-English-speaking climes is that films in English often have subtitles--sometimes also in English, which is great, otherwise in the local language which, so far, I've generally had a smattering of, all of which is a plus. I also find myself switching on English subtitles on DVDs, when the film's in that foreign language called American English.

SultanOfSwing

A casual and lax attitude to correct spelling and proof reading of documents.

I was given a copy of a proposal we put together for a customer so I could order the plants. Apparently they want a bush made of lead, because we have given them a price to provide them with two Newport 'Plumb' plants.

Yeah, yeah, I know you can't criticize anyone's spelling anymore because we're all precious flowers but FFS, this went out to a prospective customer. It makes us look like numpties and it's not the first time I've seen something like that either. "... to eliminate all grubs threw out the property" was a personal favourite from a while ago.

This was our receptionist, I believe. Shouldn't the absolute minimum requirement for someone to work on reception be a full understanding of English and good communication skills

Lion in Winter

Tell me about it. Seeing stuff that went out in our name at work that was written as though English were that person's fourth language is just embarrassing.

Nutek

innit?

Pulaski

Until a couple of years ago had a role that involved reviewing reports sent externally. The quality of the writing was dire - I would expect better from a moderately intelligent 11-12 year old.

Some of the problems were neither bad grammar nor bad syntax (though both were endemic), but a profound ignorance of what the right word was. ..... A favourite peeve of mine was, when talking about a shop attached to a gas station or a local "corner shop", calling it a "convenient store".

SultanOfSwing

You can always tell the people for whom English is a second language. They know how to communicate in it

I can't even put this one down to age, either. She's in her late 20s, not that far removed from my wife in age (and me, but I was educated in the UK so can't compare in this case) and my wife knows how to communicate properly.

I'm not knocking her, of course, she's attentive to the phones, doesn't desert her desk very often and she's helpful when I need filing done, or something faxed (this is the receptionist now, not my wife ) but I do think her professionalism is a bit lax. I'm not sure it's really right to be saying things like 'cool beans' to people when they call the office looking to speak to someone

Pulaski

I'm glad to hear that.

SultanOfSwing

I didn't think that one through, did I?

But no, not doing that either

username.exe

This grinds my gears, too.

In my position I'm usually in charge of receiving bids and proposals.

Not only is the state of grammar and spelling generally fairly poor (not always, you can tell those proposals that have been quality checked and finessed) BUT every so often I receive documents that have been copy-pasted from proposals to other clients... that still have the clients name in the document (instead of my organisation). Didn't even bother removing it.

SultanOfSwing

Oh yeah, I've seen that too.

Most of the time I get the internal job tickets for orders. Those are full of errors but I don't care, since it's only read by the project manager, the admins in the office, the guys in the field and me. It's still mildly irritating, but it's nothing like when it happens on things that go to clients, on company headed paper, signed off by our account managers.

To me, and maybe our clients don't notice, but it just makes it look like we don't double check our stuff and we don't know what we're doing.