I was awoken at 4am this morning by a mosquito buzzing around. I'd already been feasted on twice while I was sleeping, for some reason they ignore everyone around here and just pick on the fresh English meat, but I couldn't find the little sod. I could hear the high-pitched whine of his little wings, but eventually just had to 'deny' his existence in my mind and make believe he wasn't there, otherwise I'd never have got back to sleep. (Postscript: Got him in the end…)
In Portuguese, mosquitos are melgas, as opposed to moscas (pronounced 'muscas'), which are flies. Melgas is also used as a slang term for an irritating person who hangs around for no apparent reason. One of our friends calls his girlfriend 'melga', but as a pet name. Flies are everywhere in Portugal, and getting rid of them can be a major effort. We call flies potos, (pronounced, putus) which is a slang term for kids, like annoying 14-16 year olds who hang around in shopping centres, playing crap music at top volume on their tiny little mobile phone speakers. Incidentally, this is as opposed to potas, (pronounced, putas) which is a slang term for prostitute, a distinction which was lost on me for quite some time, until someone kindly pointed it out.
We used to get potos coming to our bar in the afternoons, they were the groups of kids who would come in after school and sit around drinking one cola between seven of them, before going home. Occasionally they would go on the computers and collect more friends on their hi5.com profiles, which is like Facebook in the UK.
Still, I digress. The appearance of the melga got me wondering about the most irritating things in the world today. We've covered a couple already, moscas/melgas and potos with mobile phones, but what else is there?
The following is not a definitive list by any stretch, I’m sure there are many more that can be added, so over to you. In the meantime here's my list:
Chain emails, containing PowerPoint presentations with pictures of babies/sunsets/landscapes, etc with text in a script font saying how wonderful friendship/the world/god is before telling you to pass it on to 10 friends and you'll receive good fortune/money, etc. These get deleted. Instantly.
Facebook/hi5 applications. No, I really don't want to add another cuddle or funwall application, I don’t want to be poked or prodded or be asked by some total stranger if I want to add one of the over 20,000 applications (yes, that many) that are on Facebook. I really don't want to know which celebrity couple we are (Tom and Katie, dammit) and vampires and zombies were deleted from my profile long ago. All I want is to stay in touch with my friends, and add the occasional photo, is that too much?
Internet money-making schemes. In our present situation we've been looking at all avenues, and have inevitably come across these money-making websites. Why do they all look the same, like the one's here and here, and why are they all so long, without actually saying anything. Does anyone actually read all of this stuff?
Bank commercials offering great returns. On the radio at the moment are loads of commercials for credit, loans, etc. One is a 30 second commercial from Millennium bank. The bit where they tell you that you can make loads of money with their new product is 15 seconds long, and sounds great (high interest, etc), but then there is another 15 seconds of verbal 'small print' giving the actual conditions that you can only achieve these savings if you tie your money up for a certain length of time, and if you invest a minimum amount, usually 1,000€, each month. In a country where the average salary is just over 800€ per month, this automatically excludes a lot of people, yet the idea is that people miss this bit and go into the bank, where they find they can’t get this product but we have this one… it’s not so good, but…
Why can't they just be honest and say 'give your money to us and we'll keep it and make loads of money for ourselves and chuck you back a pitiful return after a year or so. Oh, and by the way, if you earn less than 1,000€ per month don't bother because you're too poor. But you can give us your money anyway and we'll collect it all together and give 12 million Euro loans to our children.'
Commercial breaks on Portuguese TV. British TV used to be called the best in the world. I’m not sure whether that is true now, with Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, and all of those cheap reality shows, but at least you don’t have 15 minute commercial breaks! In the UK, a break was just enough time to make a cup of tea, or get a beer. In Portugal, you can eat lunch, have a nice glass of wine, and still have to sit through trailers for the next Brazilian novella before your film continues. By which time you’ve forgotten what is going on. Alternatively you surf onto another channel and only remember what you were watching about 30 minutes later, by which time you’ve missed a chunk of the programme you were interested in. The only redeeming feature is the breaks are about 90 minutes apart, and we have a DVD recorder, so can record and fast forward through the boring bits.
Lists of the greatest… Be this comedy sketches, songs, or viral emails, just how irritating is it to see lists of things on TV hosted by some ex-soap star or d-list celebrity, with talking heads of other d-list celebrities reminiscing about great songs of the 1980's that you've never heard of or can't remember. Or lists created just for another excuse to show crap commercials from the seventies, or lists of stuff that irritates you about... Oh...
By the way, if you were wondering where the obligatory football posting was today, since Germany played like such a bunch of numpties yesterday I thought better not prolong the torture. Congratulations to Spain, the better team certainly won.
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