Pet Peeves - Upside Down Eights

The lazy posts continue unabated.

I hate upside down eights. Usually they rear their top-heavy heads on petrol station price signs, screaming to the world at large that whoever shoves the back-lit numbers up there on the board can't tell his elbow from his arse. Or at least his head from his feet.

Upside down eights are glaring markers of a fundamental lack of attention to detail in the life of the person who saw fit to confuse the big loop with the little loop. "Check me out," they say, "I can't work out how to read a fucking number. Guess what else I can't work out? Lots of stuff, I'm betting."

So I was walking down San Jose Avenue near my house on the weekend and no shit, this is what I saw bolted to the front of a house...

It's your house! Your fucking $800,000 house! Get it fucking right! I can forgive a barely employable and savagely undereducated petrol station minimum-wager for mucking it up, but when you're attaching these things in a more or less permanent fashion to the exterior of your San Francisco love-pad you should probably take a second or two to see which way is up. It's not hard. Pretty simple really. Little loop on top. Big loop on bottom. Christ!

Pet Peeves - The Upside Down Eight

I'm a man of many opinions, some might say too many, and stashed away in that peanut brain of mine is a litany of pet peeves. One of my favourites is the gas station upside down eight. By the way, I gave up clinging to referring to gas stations as petrol stations a few years ago. Some battles are futile and when it comes to how one refers to the location where one procures fuel for one's vehicle it's best to adopt the "when in Rome" approach. For the record I still call aluminium "aluminium". The fact that America persists in referring to that particular metal as "aluminum" hints at a cockup as vast and as far reaching as the one that instituted the use of the word "entre" as an umbrella term for the main course instead of the starters. You'd think that the translation of the word from the French would have given the progenitor of that mistake a decent idea about its intended use.

Anyway, so I hate upside down eights on gas station pricing signs. The little loop goes on the top, the big loop goes on the bottom. It's not hard to sort out. Just take a look at the number: little loop top; big loop bottom. If you can't work something as simple as that out then there's probably a whole raft of other aspects of your life that are seemingly simple to most but confound you at every turn.

And I won't hear any of those "we're free to be creative with our use of language" arguments either. Those sorts of arguments usually come from people who can't muddle their way through the use of such newly dispensable stuff as, um, grammar and punctuation. Hey, if it's too tough to work out just jettison it wholesale and write the exercise off as an act of creativity. Guess what, folks, you have to know the rules before you break 'em. James Joyce knew how to handle direct quotes before he resorted to that whole hyphen thing.