DRMacIver's Notebook

Shared frustrations

Published: 2024-01-20

I am, it will shock you to know, annoyingly finickity about things being done correctly. It hurts me somewhere deep in my soul when people do things in obviously suboptimal ways.Importantly I’m fine with people doing things less well because it’s easier. What annoys me is when people are obviously failing by their own standards, getting worse outcomes for a worse experience of doing the thing.

I try to reign this in. I don’t actually like telling people off, so I’ll often be silently frustrated rather than telling someone about it.This is a bad idea for anything recurring, because as a result I sound super annoyed by minor things when I finally break and do say something about it. I’m not saying I don’t do that, I’m just saying I do that and I know it’s a bad idea. If you will, an obviously suboptimal approach that is failing even by my own standards…

Let me tell you two instances of this recently and something interesting I learned from them.

The first is this: We have an instant pot. Its pressure cooking mode gets used for roughly two categoires of things: Making stock (usually beef, sometimes chicken), and what you might think of as “normal cooking” - stews, etc.

Crucially, these take very different times. Stock takes about four hours, normal cooking takes somewhere between 20 and 45 minutes.

Adjusting the time on an instant pot is very slow. This makes switching between these two times irritating. Fortunately, the instant pot has a feature for this: The pressure cooker remembers two previous times, and you can press the pressure cook button to switch between them. So you can have it remember a four hour time and a half hour time, and everything is fine.

At least, everything is fine if people use this feature and don’t set both timers to four hours, forcing me to do the slow adjustment process every time I used the normal cooking mode. Very annoying.

I did eventually explain this feature to the others in my house, and of course neither of them knew about this feature - it’s not like they would have been maliciously setting the timer wrong, and it’s a pretty non obvious feature until you know about it, and I only found out about it relatively recently. Problem solved. But I’d been vaguely annoyed every time I used the instant pot for the entire several month period between discovering this feature and telling people about it.To be clear I don’t use the instant pot that often, so we’re talking about maybe 3 or 4 times at most.

More on this in a moment, but now let me tell you about another kitchen irritation: Someone has been stacking the pots wrong. This means that the cupboard doesn’t close properly because the pot stack is too tall.

There’s a specific stacking order to the pots. If you get it right, the pot stack is short enough for everything to work fine. If you get it wrong, they don’t nest and it’s too tall. Someone had been placing pots in a non-nesting order, and this was causing problems.

Eventually we were in the kitchen together at the time when the pots needed stacking, and I showed them how to do it. “Oh, that’s how you stack them! I had no idea those nested, they look exactly the same size. That’s been so annoying.”

There are two interesting things about this response:

They were in fact correct, it was slightly non-obvious. The pots are not exactly the same size, but they do look pretty similar from the outside, it’s just that one has much thinner metal than the other so although they look similar in size the slightly smaller one nests easily in the slightly larger one, because the interior of the slightly larger one is much larger relative to the slightly smaller one than their exterior would suggest.
They’d been annoyed by this too, and I hadn’t shown them how to solve their annoying problem.

This recontextualised some things for me.

That instant pot thing? Adjusting the timer to four hours from half an hour is just as annoying as adjusting the timer from four hours to half an hour. I shared it as a “this is a thing you do that is annoying to me and here is how to not do it” but in actual fact it was probably a thing we both were finding frustrating, and that I could easily have shared as “Hey you know that annoying thing? I’ve figured out the solution!”.

The thing about being annoyingly finickity is that because I care about doing things right, and because I debug everything so reflexively is that “obviously suboptimal ways” is not actually obvious to others. It’s obvious to me because I’ve figured it out. Sometimes through careful problem solving and sometimes because I accidentally pressed the button twice and noticed what happened when I did.

When I’ve done that, I can share this knowledge.

The silly thing is that I’m actually very good at sharing knowledge a lot of the time. I have a sort of habitual attitude of teaching when people ask me for help. e.g. a great habit of mine that you should definitely steal is that when people can’t find a link and I find it using search, I give them both the link and also tell them how I found it. This is a great way of helping people be better at search, which is a surprisingly deep and hard to learn skill.The downside of this habit is that it sounds a bit too “let me google that for you” if you’re not careful. I usually telegraph why I’m doing this quite carefully, and am very explicit that it’s not a problem if they apologise for not googling for it themselves.

Similarly, I’m good at sharing information spontaneously - you’re reading this on one of my outlets for doing so.

But volunteering information to someone specific, in response to something that they’re doing wrong, feels different. Like I said, it feels like telling them off, and I don’t like doing that. It feels bad for me to do it, and I’m worried about people reacting badly to it. Most people don’t like unsolicited advice. Not that I expect anything to go terribly wrong from telling partners about minor things, but it might hurt their feelings and I don’t actually like doing that.

I do think this fear is somewhat real - a lot of the time people don’t like being told they’re doing it wrong, and often wrong is subjective. Sometimes I’m wrong because the suboptimal way is in fact optimising for some preference I don’t know about. I suspect it’s exaggerated in my head, but it is a real possibility.

But I think a lot of the time, the fear is largely the result of a skill issue on my part, and I need to stop thinking in terms of “argh you’re doing it wrong” and more “boy it looks annoying to do it that way. Can I show you a thing?” and see how people respond.