Sometimes, it seems, people ignore minuscule annoyances for such an extended period of time that the effort required to solve the issue is significantly less than the sum total of inconvenience caused.

Fixing the problem almost always leads to thinking “Damn, I wish I had done that earlier”. Why do people do that? Maybe everyone has a tolerance for putting up with life’s miscellaneous  annoyances and thus never really find it necessary to fix. Maybe it’s just the false perception that the time and effort required to alleviate the problem isn’t worth the 1 second inconvenience caused by the problem.

Venturing away from the abstract leads me to think of one of the most illustrative examples I can think of. My ex-roommate had a small fridge in his room for his own personal stock of beverages, eggs, and other random shit. This fridge sat on a rug which in turn naturally sat on the floor. Well actually the fridge sat right in front of the rug. The preposition matters because the door was blocked from opening by the edge of the rug… so you had to step on the rug a certain way in order to let the fridge door pass over the top of it.

I watched him struggle with that for two years, for no reason. The solution? Taking 30 seconds to put some old magazines under the fridge to prop it up enough to give it clearance over the rug. Problem solved.

Take the time to evaluate the integral of annoyance over time. Compare to the effort required to solve said annoyance. Reflect, act,  and continue with your life… only better.

There honestly are very few things worse when it comes to music than the un-synchronized push/pull shitstorm that is the audience clapping along to a live song. Whether its a 500-person congregation of upper-middle-class white protestant sheeple clapping along to ‘Lord I Lift Your Name On High” or the Canadian-infused audience at the figure skating competition in the Olympics this year… it’s a pretty offensive sound. It’s like jamming a car into gear without clutching over and over again, or consistently using incorrect grammar in every sentence. You never can quite relax into enjoying whatever it is you’re enjoying because the +/- 0.5 measure delays are making the timing section in your brain want to kill itself.

Can’t really blame people, though. Acoustics play a large part in it, especially in large venues. But even still people should understand the speed of sound matters once you get far enough away from something, so scratch that… you can blame people.

What absolutely kills it is when the piece features tempo changes or ritardandos at the end… you hear the audience struggle and ultimately give up as their feeble understanding of musical time and temp falls apart around them like a lean-to in a category-5 tornado. I can’t imagine what would happen if they tried to clap along with an odd meter song like The Ocean by Led Zeppelin or Take Five by Dave Brubeck…

Besides, clapping along to music is just about the corniest method of music expression out there. Shake your ass, dance, fist pump even… just don’t add your own cacophony to the performance en masse with the rest of the musically challenged audience.