Joe Palca - Annoying

Krebaum’s recipe also includes soap, to get the greasy spray off the pet, and baking soda, which he says neutralizes the sulfonic acid and helps convert another stinky component in the spray into something more benign. Thioacetates are thiols with acetic acid attached. “The stinkiest sulfur compounds always have a free hydrogen on the sulfur and some number of carbons on the other side. If you remove that hydrogen and attach acetic acid to it, it’s kind of a temporary attachment because it will break down with water to form a thiol,” Krebaum says. That’s why if a dog gets wet, it will start to stink of skunk again, months after the initial spraying—the thioacetates hydrolyze into thiols, and the smell returns. These chemicals “act to give the skunk spray long-lasting coverage,” says Krebaum. The baking soda raises the pH, which helps speed up the breakdown of thioacetate into acetate and thiols, which can then be oxidized.

This is a rare success story, in which the offending annoyance can be effectively treated. The $3 elixir neutralizes the annoyance on contact, turning it into something benign.

One of our colleagues, NPR science correspondent Christopher Joyce, told us about what annoys him, and he thinks he has it worse than anyone. It’s not that his pet peeve is more unpredictable, longer lasting, or more unpleasant than other people’s. It’s just that he’s annoyed at a time when he should have some respite from being annoyed. He’s annoyed while he sleeps.

You can be annoyed all day long, but you can go to bed at night knowing that except for a noisy neighbor or his dog or a mosquito in the air or a lumpy bed, you’ve escaped the daily mine field of annoyance. Not me.

No, when I go to bed, I enter the annoyed man’s nightmare—the recurring dream. The details change, but the theme is always the same. I’m trying to get somewhere important. I’m trying to catch a plane, and time is running out. Trying to get to a meeting or a class on time. Trying to find a bathroom, urgently, of course. Worst of all, trying to rendezvous with a beautiful woman. Oh, yes, that’s when it’s most annoying.

Because what happens, every time, is that something keeps me from getting there. I’m driving, and I get lost. My cabdriver stops to get lunch and disappears. There’s an accident on the freeway. The public toilets are under repair and out of service. Once there was an earthquake, and I had to get out of a car and walk (I think that was a woman-rendezvous dream).

At first, I struggle diligently to find an alternate route—after all, I’m a responsible person, at least in my dreams. I hail down another cab, book another flight. But soon enough it dawns on me that whatever I do is hopeless. I am foiled, again and again. Sorry, flight canceled due to bad weather. Road work ahead. Bridge down. Detour.

Now, I’ve traveled a lot in my life, all over the place, in war zones and Amazonian rainforests and Tibetan highlands and on rickshaws and in dugout canoes. I know about washed-out bridges and drunken bus drivers and chain-smoking customs agents who’ll wait days until you come up with the bribe. My subconscious is loaded with examples with which to impale a traveler like a butterfly pinned to a patch of felt.

Eventually, I reach a stage of weary acceptance. I’m not going to make it to my destination. I realize I’m in that dream again, I’m asleep, and that bastard who lives somewhere in my head is doing this on purpose, writing the script as I sleep, making sure that whatever clever solution I come up with, he’ll trump it. And there’s nothing I can do because that bastard is me… the annoying me, annoying me.

Gotta go now… got a plane to catch.

What is happening here? Chris has a goal and can’t achieve it. He’s trying to get somewhere. We’ve been talking about things that are physically unpleasant, but this is a whole new subclass of unpleasantness: something standing in your way. Think of why traffic jams are annoying. They’re unexpected, and all of the inching forward gives you hope that it will clear up around the next bend. The key aspect of the jam, however—which affects how you react to it—is not its intensity but instead how urgently you need to be somewhere else. Annoyances don’t often block you completely; most of the time they simply make the journey toward your goal worse. “A lot of annoyance comes when you are trying to do something or make something,” says Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Michigan. “You’re trying to bake a cake, and all of a sudden you realize you don’t have any eggs. It’s so annoying! Because now you’re going to have to go out and get them. It’s interfering with your doing something that you want to do. Something that is not squarely between you and your goal but is kind of distracting you from doing what you want to do or accomplishing what you want to do. I think that probably is what annoyance is.”

Whether it’s a fly diverting your attention, a dripping faucet preventing you from sleeping, a traffic jam keeping you from reaching your destination, an instruction booklet where the words and the diagrams don’t match, or those twist ties that are attached to every part of a toy in its box for protection during shipping, which drags your speed in assembling toys on a birthday or Christmas morning down to a crawl, annoyances slow you down in some way. “It’s not like a big rock in the path,” says Nesse. “It’s more like a lot of rain along the way. It’s just an annoying interference that makes it harder for you to make progress toward your goal.”

The double annoyance for Joyce, as he points out, is that he’s supposed to be sleeping, a time when you have the opportunity to do your best fantasy work. In a dream, Joyce could fly the plane, get the girl, and go to the bathroom, all with no trouble at all—yet his subconscious decides to thwart him, even in his sleep.

Being a flight attendant is annoying. One part of the job seems almost specifically designed for frustration, because the attendants have to serve a lot of passengers in a short space of time. “So I’m taking orders and pouring drinks at a pretty good clip,” says Sarah, an experienced flight attendant with a major North American airline. “But every so often, I get someone who asks for coffee. I ask, ‘Do you want cream and sugar with that?’ And the passenger can’t decide. So I stand there, waiting, while this jerk tries to remember whether he likes cream and sugar in his coffee. I mean, he’s had coffee probably ten thousand times in his life. How can it be hard to decide whether you want cream and sugar?” Just the memory of this experience gets her a bit agitated.

Annoyances are part of life. They are unavoidable and ubiquitous. Most of the time, despite our best efforts, annoyances get under our skin, cloud our judgment, and distract us from the task at hand.

Yet there are professions where succumbing to annoyance can have extremely dire consequences. You don’t want the pilot of your airplane to be swatting at a fly in the cockpit while trying to land the plane in a thunderstorm. You don’t want your neurosurgeon to become infuriated by a high-pitched whine coming from the fluorescent lights in the operating theater. You probably don’t want an annoying waiter to pester your chef while he’s adding cayenne pepper to the sauce for your meal.

There seem to be two extremes in coping with annoyance. One is to fight back with every inch of your being, or, as Hamlet put it, “To take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.” Coping may not be precisely the right word when you rip the headphones off the annoying jerk who is playing his music too loudly in the seat next to you. Catharsis may be a better word. Yet it is coping, in the sense that after you’ve done it, you no longer feel annoyed.