A post from my archives? Well, this could be interesting. Do I retrieve something from Meerkat Musings, or do I go further back in time, to a younger, less mature me, and poke around at what I had written on old, long-defunct sites?

I’ve alluded one such old site before. The Site of Sothis… yeah, not as catchy as Meerkat Musings is it? The Wayback Machine’s means of archiving old sites doesn’t always preserve everything, and for reasons unknown, my home internet service really doesn’t like the site. Weirdly, I can access it via mobile data, but I use the same provider for home broadband as I do my mobile service. Technology eh?

I should note, my personal views and beliefs back then are not necessarily what I hold to now. Like anyone, I have lived and learned. It has been nearly 20 years since I first pieced the Site of Sothis together, and I hope any of you that duck into the old site realise it reflects a younger, less-wise me. Well, younger me.

The Site of Sothis was active from late 2003, to early 2006. Prior to that, I had a Geocities site, and I am fairly sure that is buried in the Wayback Machine too, but finding it is a little more difficult, and I am not all that interested anyway. I’m going to pluck from the ether a snapshot of the old Sothis site from September 2004. The post in question is reproduced below, unedited, and with all the original spelling and grammar. Please don’t judge me!

I’m sure all of us have things that make us snarl with anger or irritation or frustration.  Well, here are a few of mine…

1.  Have you ever been waiting in line a bus stop or in a queue in a store, stuck there as someone at the front of the queue dithers?  It’s one of my pet peeves- if you’re paying bus fare or for goods in a shop, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR MEANS OF PAYMENT READY!!!  Transactions should be conducted swiftly and without stopping to chat to the bus driver/cashier, otherwise what happens is that everyone else in the queue will get grumpy.

2.  Similar to the first problem, is the problem of cashiers who dither.  They process your purchase very slowly, or are having a good old chit-chat to a friend on another till.  If you’ve got customers, they want to buy their item and go- they’re not interested in how you spent your weekend!

3.  Blockadges.  By this I mean, people in an aisle with a trolley (shopping cart to Americans) who somehow manage to stop so they and their trolley are impeding the aisle. DO NOT IMPEDE THE AISLE!  It does nothing except piss off anyone and everyone who is trying to get past you.

4.  Bots.  Specifically, the kind of bot that spams you when you’re using a messenger program.  I am NOT interested in it’s sordid little links or attempts to get me to pay to see a webcam girl do things I’ve already seen.

5.  At the moment the newspapers (well, the tabloids) are making a huge fuss over David Beckham and his alleged affairs.  The woman at the centre of the scandal, Rebecca Loos, is behaving like she’s been wounded, whilst she is quietly making a fortune from selling her story.  She says she simply wants to tell the truth- which is rubbish.  She’s making a lot of money from her story, and was always going to- stories about David Beckham sell like hotcakes and Rebecca, being his personal assistant, would have known that.

In fact, this is an issue that goes beyond the supposed antics of one football player.  Whenever a celebrity is constantly in the news and/or they are about to do something big, someone will make some sort of negative claim about them.  There need not be any truth to these claims, the allegations alone guaruntee the person making the claim a fortune in newspaper and TV deals for their story.  Never mind the hurt and problems the allegations may bring to the subject of said allegations (especially if the claims turn out to be lies), it’s all about money and fame.  Such things annoy me because it shows how superficial society can be- the message from the media is ‘if you have a story that’s seedy and scandalous, then forget how much pain it will cause, sell it to us and we’ll make you into a star’.  That message is blatantly wrong.

6.  Arrogance.  People who act like they know it all and who can presume that they can tell you what you know too.  People, at the end of the day, no one can tell you what your limits are, or set your limits for you.  You are the one who decides what you are ready for and what you are capable of.  People who try to do that for you, who presume they have the right to do that, should be ignored.

7.  Computer glitches.  These drive me mad.  Why it can’t be that a computer is made that can actually cope with the rigours of games and the internet.  I can’t stand Windows errors and I HATE it when I’m in the middle of a game, at an intense moment, and BLAM!  It crashes.

Well, those are seven things that make me see red.  Who knows, this page may grow in time.  For now, that’s all folks!

To be fair, some of this stuff can still boil my blood. Blocking an aisle or path irritates me, because half the time (especially in a supermarket) there’s plenty of room, so why people feel the need to spread out and occupy it is beyond me. Computer malfunctions can be costly, in more ways than one, so that still annoys me. Some of it is stuff I’ve learned to be less stressed about. Hopefully, it’s an interesting glimpse into what my hot buttons were back then.