Letters to People I Hate

Dear Psych producers,

I miss the pineapple.

For the uninitiated Psych is a hilarious show about an observant goof-off who pretends to be a psychic to help the Santa Barbara police solve crimes. While the criminal element isn’t particularly scary or clever, the show is great, with lots of inside jokes and repeating themes. Every episode, along with crazy names for Gus, Shawn lusting after Juliet, and Lassiter drawing his gun, there is a pineapple. Maybe someone was eating one, or offering one as a gift, or using one as a conversation starter. Then you decided to change things.

Suddenly finding the pineapple became a game. You could win stupid prizes by seeing the hidden pineapple in one of the scenes and texting usa network/psych. When did TV become something you have to work for? I loved seeing the pineapple in each episode. Now I have no idea where it is. And it’s hardly a pineapple anymore, you have pineapples on a shirt, or a pineapple statue. I hate it. They don’t even talk about the pineapple anymore. You took away all the fun. I want to sit back and enjoy the show. You removed an inside joke and encouraged people to start stupid websites devoted to pineapple finding.

I don’t want my TV to be interactive. I’m not a toddler watching Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer. I’m not going to shout, “Behind you! There’s the pineapple!” I just want to watch a comedy and chuckle a bit. Are producers so desperate for ratings and visits to their shows’ websites they have to make watching the show into a contest? What happened to doing things without a cellphone in your hand or a laptop next to you on the couch? I’m relaxing at the end of the day and thanks to my DVR I rarely watch a show as it’s recording, so even if I do find the pineapple, I doubt I’m getting my prize four days later.

Bring back all the parts of the show I love. What’s next, instead of Shawn giving Gus a nickname there will be a long pause and we have to text in a funny name ourselves? Stop with the interactive crap and give me back my delicious fruit.

Sincerely,

Kelly

Dear readers,

Oh no! Another skipped Sunday letter and a very late Tuesday letter, which isn’t really a letter at all, because I love you guys. Apparently I cannot hate on a schedule. Yes, I tried to write the letters in advance and have them post on the days I promised, but I ran out of people to hate. 

That is only partly true. But the letters are getting redundant. Dumb customers asking to talk to a specific manager, then leaving the store for 30 minutes, and asking all grumpily when they get back, “Well, is she here?” WTF? No, she came over here and then went back to work. You LEFT THE STORE!! Was she supposed to follow you to the Gap? Did you want us to call security and ask them to page you? Because I’m not sure they do that. I’m not sure what they do.

This gets old. Horrible drivers gets old too. Even the guy who stopped in the middle of the road when he saw the hot girls handing out free Monster at a gas station so he could turn right from the middle lane after traffic cleared. 

So what’s an adorably witty blogger to do? This is where you come in. Send me your crappy people stories and I will write them a letter. You can even print it out and mail it to them. I would love to hear any follow up stories on that course of action.

If you send a story (short or long, specific or vague “I hate when…” complaints) I will do my best to write a letter. I will sign it “Sincerely Kelly on behalf of (Your Name)” and I will finally get some new material.

Post in the comments or email letterstopeopleihate@gmail.com

Do it now or else you will have to deal with another dry spell. 

Sincerely,

Kelly

Dear morons trying to turn left,

There were four of you on my way home today. Everyone driving my route home was lucky not to be involved in a head on collision. The first one of you I encountered decided it would be fun to turn left from the lane next to the left turn lane. While a driver was in the left turn lane, turning left. You tried to turn into the left of the two lanes in the cross road and were dismayed to find a car there. Swerving occurred and then we all went on our merry way. I sped past you, worried you might change lanes with no notice and run me off the road.

The next two idiots had separate cars, but were making the same bad choice. The road we were driving on was four lanes, two heading in each direction. You two were driving east while I was driving west. Then you both decided to turn left, a common decision for the night. Unfortunately, you picked the left lane on my side of the road, mistaking it for a middle turn lane. It’s not. It was actually one of the two oncoming traffic lanes. Oncoming as in head on. It is not a left turn lane. There is a left turn lane in the general area, and I can see the second moron blindly following the first, but you are both still idiots. We all had to get in the right lane and drive around you. The people who wanted to use the left turn lane got to make a sharp turn into the actual left turn lane after passing you jackasses.  

The fourth person making a big fail out of a left turn might have been the best. By this time I was driving on a four lane one way road. One block south is a four lane road going in the opposite direction. The neighborhood roads connecting the two are not one way roads. You were in the wrong lane, it seems to be happening a lot today. I’ve been driving before and realized the I’m about to pass the road I wanted to turn down. I try to get over and failing that, go up a block or so and loop around. This is because I have a brain in my head and I like to use it from time to time. You are different. You had to get over two lanes to turn properly. Since you didn’t have time to do this you came to a stop. At 6:20 while people are trying to get home. So yes, we were speeding a bit and going between 35 and 45 mph. And you were stopped. After enough people had passed those unfortunate enough to be stuck directly behind you, you turned left. Across three lanes of traffic. Goddamn drivers.

My husband drives 90 minutes to work and even he thinks my 25 minute drive is horrible.

Sincerely,

Kelly

I don’t have a letter today, but I do have some quick notes. I’m posting them here so I don’t have to buy www.letterstopeopleifindmildlyirritating.com.

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To: Overly interested head nodding lady

You, like the rest of the people in these notes only irritated me a bit. Your actions weren’t enough to necessitate a full on letter, so you get a note. I went to an author talk with a friend of mine yesterday. Every time he made a point, or paused for a longish amount of time you nodded. Hot damn it was annoying. I get nodding every once in a while, usually when something is said that you didn’t get from the novel on your own. Like, “Oh, I hadn’t made that connection on my own.” But you were doing the, “Yes, I know what you’re talking about because I am so smart and clever. We have so much in common.” I know you were thinking this because I could see the smug smile on your face. Trust me, no one looks clever when their head is bobbing up and down like a bobblehead.

From: Kelly

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To: Clever voicemail people,

Oh, how you drive me crazy. Here is one of the more annoying voicemails I have been forced to listen to over the years. 

“Hi, I’m Sally’s iPhone. Treat me nice and maybe she’ll call you back.”

Sally, how about you don’t try to be cute and instead you record your name and number on your voicemail. I’m sure that is what you want me to do. As opposed to this:

“Hi, Sally, I’m Kelly. You and your iPhone are assholes. I don’t want you to call me back, I want you to grow up.”

Normally I wouldn’t drag a phone down with its owner, but you started it.

From: Kelly

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To: Gretchen on Project Runway

You are a huge bitch. AJ is adorable with a quirky sense of style and you are a turncoat, loud mouth, douchette. You should have gone home, you were the de facto leader and should have been eliminated after heading up the design on such a boring oversized collection. It’s like you took the potato sacks last season and covered them with “grandpa sweaters”. The only redeeming factor is you got the full force of Tim Gunn’s “disappointed parent” speech. And you had to see Casanova named the winner. I know that hurt.

From: Kelly 

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P.S. I know I didn’t have a letter on Sunday. I can’t stick to a schedule. I’m a badass.

Dear customers who don’t understand the alphabet,

I thought I could avoid writing letters to people who are nice enough to buy things at the store, but it just isn’t happening. Some customers want to use the computers to look up books themselves, they seem disappointed when I say that it is my job to look up books for them. You are not those customers. You need help, and handholding, and a guided tour of the store - particularly the Fiction section. 

I had the distinct pleasure of helping two of you people recently. Our Fiction section starts in the front right corner of the store and follows the right wall until all the books (organized by author last name: A-Z) have run out, then History starts. The section is divided by alcoves, if we put all the books against the wall our store would have to quadruple in size. The alcoves are where we lose people like you. 

One of you, a middle aged woman, came up to me at the middle information desk a few weeks ago. 

“I can’t find the book I’m looking for. The author is Chris Cleave. But I can’t find their books. In fact, I can’t find any of the C last name authors.”

Really? You can’t find any of the C last name authors? I was nice and didn’t ask how hard you looked. I took you over to the first fiction alcove. On our way there we passed the second alcove containing authors He- through Mu-. 

“I was here, I couldn’t find the C’s.”

I showed you into the corner where Fiction starts.

“Oh, I didn’t go this far over! Here’s the book. I didn’t even look over here. I was over there.” You pointed toward the second alcove. “But I didn’t come over here.”

I bit my tongue and smiled at you, asked if you needed any thing else, and walked away. I had a question I couldn’t ask, but I’ll ask it now. Why didn’t you go into the first alcove? If I were in a store and I wanted a C last name author and I found the H last name authors, I would go left. That’s just how the alphabet works.

Later that same week another one of you, a gentleman, asked a similar question. 

“I can’t find The English Major by Jim Harrison.”

I took you to the first fiction alcove. On the way we had a similar conversation about how you had seen the He- books, but not the Ha-’s. I tried to be nice.

“Yeah, I think the Poetry sign hanging over here throws a lot of people off.”

Your response was not nice.

“Well, yeah. I thought it was all poetry. It’s very confusing.”

Really? Is it? You get to Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. You want The English Major by Jim Harrison. Again it is the simple act of moving LEFT. Even if the Poetry sign confused you, where did you think the other books were? A through Ha is a lot of authors. A lot of famous authors. Did you think we loved poetry so much we got rid of Austen and Dickens and the Bronte sisters? Did you wander off into Mysteries or SciFi or Horror looking for Jim Harrison? What was going through your head? 

You people confound me. Do we need to label every shelf? You’re as bad as people who ask how the books are arranged and then give a strange look when I say by author last name within the section. How do you want them arranged? Color? Author first name? Second word in the title, we’ll just get rid of all the single word title books.

If you can’t follow the organization of the alphabet I can’t help but think you can’t follow the plot of the books you are purchasing. If you aren’t going to use the space in your head for a brain you should rent it out to people with excess jewelry. Fashionable women can take you to parties and use your skull as a purse. You can follow them around marveling at how the bathroom is behind a door and you never would have thought to look there.

Sincerely,

Kelly

Dear New Jersey,

WTF?

I check my Google Analytics for this site everyday, close to hourly if I have the day off work, and you have pissed me off recently. My state has the most visits in any given time period (shown by a nice deep green) and until now you have been just another beige-ish green state on the map. Then you turned dark green, not as dark as my home state, but you became state number 2 for the month.

This is not a bad thing. I thought it was cool that a state where I don’t know anyone was visiting the site. Oklahoma visited a lot during the Spring when I was writing more often and that made me happy. But Oklahoma made the rest of my stats rise too (time spent on the site increased and the bounce rate decreased). You are ruining my stats. I got all excited about New Jersey and you disappointed me. 

Do you know how dirty I felt to be excited about New Jersey? It wasn’t something I ever expected to happen. As a child I longed to be a New Yorker and even after learning to love Chicago and the midwest I find NJ pollution filled and unpleasant. Yes, it’s a generalization and no, I’ve never visited. But I believe everything Ted has said in his rants on How I Met Your Mother. Even the Stephanie Plum novels don’t paint a pretty picture of the Garden State.

It’s two cities in particular (Williamstown and Westwood) but I hold the entire state accountable. I don’t care if it’s bots or whatever the hell other crap visits sites and leaves immediately. Your state gets shit on for a lot of reasons and you need to do something about it. So stop visiting. I don’t want New Jersey to be green ever again, even if you are reading the site. 

Sincerely,

Kelly

Dear “One for the Money” casting director,

The Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich is my guilty pleasure of reading. I recently bought the entire series from a friend for $10. (I said guilty pleasure, I’m not paying retail.) They are the closest to reading romance I will ever get, I have strong opinions on the plot (Ranger over Morelli), and I was excited about the movie. Until you chose stupid Katherine Heigl to play Stephanie. That chick is blonde and she ruined Grey’s Anatomy with her whining and bad acting. She was not the pull for “Knocked Up” and that “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” knock-off “Killers” got a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Also she looks terrible as a brunette. It’s like photoshop happened in real life.

I tried to ignore all of this in favor of Daniel Sunjata playing Ranger. Hot guy playing a hot guy, you got one right. Granted Ranger has darker skin than Sunjata and longer hair, but clearly the women love him (how many times has he been in a Lifetime movie/show?). I wouldn’t mind watching him run around in a tight black shirt, so who cares if Heigl is playing Stephanie Plum. We all know I’m going to put myself in Heigl’s place anyway. Sorry husband. <3

Then you really screwed up. Let me give you two names: Joseph Morelli and Jason O’Mara. How about two ethnicities to go with those names: Italian and Irish. The guys are close to having matching initials, and both Italian and Irish start with an “I”, but the only way you could have been further off was if you cast a woman. O’Mara was born and raised in Dublin. The kids on Jersey Shore are more Italian. The Irish are pale, I would know, and the Italian are tan. So sue me if I’m being stereotypical here, the books certainly are.

He’s also not that good looking. Sorry Jason, but when I read about a handsome, angular Italian I expect a lot more than you can deliver. Continuing on, Nate Mooney would be better cast as Walter “Moonman” than Eddie Gazarra. How is this not the face of a stoner? It’s definitely not the face of a cop. Plus, I always thought Gazarra was chubby.

Other people are waiting until they see the movie to judge the casting choices. Not me. I plan on being irritated for the next 11 months as I see stills and commercials for a funny/sexy book turned inept/shitty movie. It’s no wonder the movie is down 18% in popularity this week on imdb.

Sincerely,

Kelly

Dear James Patterson,

Many people have speculated that you use a fill in the blank rubric for your novels. That is when you aren’t having your “co-writer” do everything and slapping your name on the cover in a font double the size their name gets. I don’t have a huge problem with this, 17 books in three years? Why not! Quick paragraphs and chapters make people feel like they’ve accomplished something. Look at me! I read soooo fast! If these people want to read crap, I say let them.

What I’m thinking is we let book reviewers in on the process. I know the quotes on the back cover of your books aren’t written by people whose literary opinion I would ever take seriously. I’m impressed they have jobs to tell the truth, so I made a little cheat sheet using actual reviews from your novels, in case they ever get overwhelmed.  

Multiple Choice Book Review: James Patterson

In his latest novel James Patterson pulls the reader in to a(n)

A) gritty
B) thrilling
C) dangerous world.

After a

A) brutal murder
B) harrowing kidnapping
C) heinous crime,  

brave hero 

A) Alex Cross
B) Lt. Lindsay Boxer
C) Maximum Ride  

must use his/her

A) knowledge of the law
B) connection with the victim
C) unique tie to the crime 

before the perpetrator strikes again. This novel is a

A) gripping medical thriller
B) fantastic legal battle
C) horrifyingly captivating mystery 

from a

A) superb
B) talented
C) skillful

author. The ending

A) will shock everyone
B) you never saw coming will blow your mind
C) is full of enough twists to make your head spin. 

A must read for

A) any Patterson-adrenaline junkie
B) all thriller lovers
C) anyone with a vocabulary under 100 words.

You’re welcome.

Sincerely,

Kelly

Oh hello,

I didn’t see you there.

It’s been a while since I last wrote a letter, which probably means a lot of my readers are long gone. Sucks to be them, because I have all new hate to dispense to the lucky few who stuck around. I’m trying to hate on fewer customers since, well, let me be honest here, I have a feeling the owners of the company would frown upon the source of their profits being mocked mercilessly. Another bit of honesty: all I do is work and watch TV. And drive on construction filled roads, but the “you drive like an asshole” letters all start to sound the same after a while.

To get me to write more letters my husband has offered to take me on field trips to different places so I can meet more people to hate. Isn’t that sweet? We went to Chicago a while ago, but everyone was nice and I saw Vince Vaughn (shorter than I thought); I did have a terrible Cobb salad but I’m not sure there’s a letter in that. Until we go somewhere else I will do my best to hate locally. 

I also hope to have a regular posting schedule. I know, right! Responsibility and what not, it’s crazy. You should be able to read new letters here every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Starting tomorrow you’ll be back to reading letters and laughing your ass off.

Sincerely,

Kelly

Dear Lady Shopping in a Hurry Today,

Don’t show me pictures from the sex books. It’s creepy. I’m not puritanical about sex and erotica, but I don’t want to know your opinion about the pictures in the new edition of The Joy of Sex. Don’t flip through the book while standing closer than necessary and say things like, “They used to all be sketches like this,” and shove the book at me. I also don’t know if any of the authors of the sex books are “good”. That is going to be a personal decision. Clearly you prefer sketches to the photographs of people, which you also chose to show me, but I don’t know you well enough to pick out authors you would like.

Don’t touch me either. Even if we weren’t surrounded by books about sexual pleasure, I still wouldn’t want you to pat me on the shoulder and call me sweetie. It’s inappropriate. Another things that is inappropriate: Buying sex books and puppets in the same trip. Why were you doing this? Is your sex lesson just after volunteering at the hospital? It puts strange ideas in our minds and you are already a little off.

Sincerely,

Kelly