Pet Peeve

It's too late to add this post to the Long & Short Reviews link-up, but the prompt for Wednesday's post was pet peeves.

Long ago I read an otherwise forgettable young adult novel set in an invented world, written (iirc) as a cautionary tale for girls who thought venting anger was "liberated." In the fantasy world characters activated their magical powers by getting so angry they developed hypertensive headaches. They had names based on names from our world plus the suffix "-mad." The main character, Harimad, was a girl travelling alone on some sort of quest. Along the way she met an animal called a peeve, which was indigenous to this invented planet; built like a fat cat, it was about the size of a pig and talked a bit the way a pig might talk, if it could. The peeve was not her pet but when she stopped in towns people saw the animal and, after she'd identified herself, announced her to others as "Harimad and her pet peeve."  

None of the peeves in that novel sounded as much fun to know as the pet cat who owned me at the time, but the idea of a cute, if surly, furry pet peeve has stayed with me ever since. Even after Piers Anthony wrote a novel called Pet Peeve, where the peeve is a sort of parrotlike bird who joins a party of human and humanoid Xanthians on a quest and is always spouting middle school type insults. The cat-pig-peeve animal sounded like a real animal that might have existed, saying things like "feed me." The parrot-peeve sounded more like a computer.programmed to try to annoy people.

In our real world, of course, a pet peeve is something people find annoying enough to grumble about though not annoying enough to do much else about. 

Mine is the way Microsoft's annoyance-ware regularly tells me that the computer or a program running on it "is not responding." Durrrrr..of course it's not "responding." How could it ever "respond" to anything? If anyone lived through the 1980s without being told that machines react and only living creatures can respond, why was that person allowed to write the script for the computers of people who do remember the 1980s?

That's only a peeve, because I seriously want Microsoft brought to heel and forced to stop interfering with other people's computers. Once it's recognized as theft to send to anyone else's computer anything that delays that computer's following its owner's commands, the only situations in which computers will be not processing input will be mechanical failures of magnitudes great enough to distract even word-nerds from caring if the error message is "Yo'puter's dade." Computers can't die because they've never been alive, but we'll be too worried about how much theye're going to cost to care. But as we'll be working offline most of the time, saving data on physicaL storage drives, and not receiving daily annoyances from Microsoft, we'll not be seeing any messages of that kind in most years.