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How annoyed am I?

One would not be incorrect to describe me as easily annoyed. The other day when discussing something that annoys me, I claimed that it was “1 of 3,584,394,031 things that irritated me”. As I consider the size of that number, I wonder if it is actually possible, given the finite (but unknown) number of total minutes in my life, whether that many things could actually annoy me before I drop.

Alright, so with a fair amount of rounding thrown in for a variety of reasons, lets see what I can work out. I am going to base my calculation for the number of days during which I could experience potential annoyances at about 12,500, so far. I’ve rounded down because I figure that when I was very, very young, I was not annoyed nearly as often as I am now. I could be wrong in that assumption. Really, one of my very earliest solid memories (where I am certain it is MY memory and not my memory based on a story I’ve heard from relatives over and over), is, actually, of being annoyed. I was annoyed by how it felt to walk in footy pajamas and a diaper. I know that I was three, or less, years old at the time, because of the house I was in.

I sleep on average 6 hours a night, which according to my complicated calculations, means I spend 18 hours a day awake. I believe I am annoyed more often while awake than I am while asleep, dreams aside. I am annoyed more often when I am out in public than when I am sitting by myself. However, at home I am more likely to read the news (or worse yet, randomly surf) than while I am out, and that invariable annoys me quite a lot. Therefore I do not think I need to make adjustments based on the number of days I stay at home versus going out. This gives me about 225,000 waking hours up to this point.

I think a conservative estimate would have me annoyed by something, on average, twice per hour. This obviously does not include the times I am full on pissed off, much less the times I am furious. We are talking, annoyed, irritated, peeved, vexed- the minors. This estimate would be much higher if I hadn’t spent so many hours of my life reading fiction for pleasure. Once immersed in a book, I can tune out a great many things. At twice per hour, that takes us to approximately 450,000 annoyances. Now these would all be unique occurrences, however they would not have to be unique reasons. If it annoys me today, there is a good chance the exact same thing will annoy me tomorrow. If it happens often enough, it may graduate to infuriating me.

Typically my feeling of annoyance lasts somewhere between a half second and forever, but I think it most often lasts around 2 minutes. This would mean I’ve spent around 15000 hours of my life annoyed, or more than a year and a half. However that did not take into account PMS, which I figure increases the number of times I am annoyed by around 2.5 times during the offending period (pun implied but not intended), or another 375 hours, bringing me to 15375 hour, or more than 1.75 years.

Is this a lot? I have no idea, not having another personality (that I am aware of) by which to judge things. No, I do not experience black outs or time loss, thank you very much. However, I am now wondering if you reading this is annoying me. It probably is.

Do you have a frog I can borrow?
Sleep Is Usually Better

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