hopeless. I am foiled, again and again. Sorry, flight canceled due to bad weather. Road work ahead. Bridge down. Detour.
Now, I’ve traveled a lot in my life, all over the place, in war zones and Amazonian rainforests and Tibetan highlands and on rickshaws and in dugout canoes. I
Eventually, I reach a stage of weary acceptance. I’m not going to make it to my destination. I realize I’m in that dream again, I’m asleep, and that bastard who lives somewhere in my head is doing this on purpose, writing the script as I sleep, making sure that whatever clever solution I come up with, he’ll trump it. And there’s nothing I can do because that bastard is me… the annoying me, annoying me.
Gotta go now… got a plane to catch.
What is happening here? Chris has a goal and can’t achieve it. He’s trying to get somewhere. We’ve been talking about things that are physically unpleasant, but this is a whole new subclass of unpleasantness: something standing in your way. Think of why traffic jams are annoying. They’re unexpected, and all of the inching forward gives you hope that it will clear up around the next bend. The key aspect of the jam, however—which affects how you react to it—is not its intensity but instead how urgently you need to be somewhere else. Annoyances don’t often block you completely; most of the time they simply make the journey toward your goal worse. “A lot of annoyance comes when you are trying to do something or make something,” says Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Michigan. “You’re trying to bake a cake, and all of a sudden you realize you don’t have any eggs. It’s so annoying! Because now you’re going to have to go out and get them. It’s interfering with your doing something that you want to do. Something that is not squarely between you and your goal but is kind of distracting you from doing what you want to do or accomplishing what you want to do. I think that probably is what annoyance is.”
Whether it’s a fly diverting your attention, a dripping faucet preventing you from sleeping, a traffic jam keeping you from reaching your destination, an instruction booklet where the words and the diagrams don’t match, or those twist ties that are attached to every part of a toy in its box for protection during shipping, which drags your speed in assembling toys on a birthday or Christmas morning down to a crawl, annoyances slow you down in some way. “It’s not like a big rock in the path,” says Nesse. “It’s more like a lot of rain along the way. It’s just an annoying interference that makes it harder for you to make progress toward your goal.”
The double annoyance for Joyce, as he points out, is that he’s supposed to be sleeping, a time when you have the opportunity to do your best fantasy work. In a dream, Joyce could fly the plane, get the girl, and go to the bathroom, all with no trouble at all—yet his subconscious decides to thwart him, even in his sleep.
Being a flight attendant is annoying. One part of the job seems almost specifically designed for frustration, because the attendants have to serve a lot of passengers in a short space of time. “So I’m taking orders and pouring drinks at a pretty good clip,” says Sarah, an experienced flight attendant with a major North American airline. “But every so often, I get someone who asks for coffee. I ask, ‘Do you want cream and sugar with that?’ And the passenger can’t decide. So I stand there, waiting, while this jerk tries to remember whether he likes cream and sugar in his coffee. I mean, he’s had coffee probably ten thousand times in his life. How can it be hard to decide whether you want cream and sugar?” Just the memory of this experience gets her a bit agitated.
Annoyances are part of life. They are unavoidable and ubiquitous. Most of the time, despite our best efforts, annoyances get under our skin, cloud our judgment, and distract us from the task at hand.
Yet there are professions where succumbing to annoyance can have extremely dire consequences. You don’t want the pilot of your airplane to be swatting at a fly in the cockpit while trying to land the plane in a thunderstorm. You don’t want your neurosurgeon to become infuriated by a high-pitched whine coming from the fluorescent lights in the operating theater. You probably don’t want an annoying waiter to pester your chef while he’s adding cayenne pepper to the sauce for your meal.
There seem to be two extremes in coping with annoyance. One is to fight back with every inch of your being, or, as Hamlet put it, “To take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.”
The other extreme is rising above the annoyance—not letting it get to you in the slightest. Even when the consequences are not that great, certain professions require people to try to do this. We may be able to learn from this skill. The same techniques that professionals use to shut out the annoyances of life may be of use to the rest of us in doing the same.
If you’re a baseball fan, you know exactly what we mean when we say that Joba Chamberlain has lived Chris Joyce’s nightmare, the sports equivalent of missing his rendezvous with a beautiful girl.
It was an unseasonably warm night for October in Cleveland, 81 degrees when the game began. That’s not a corny, color lead; that unseasonable warmth is an important detail. A breeze was blowing from Lake Erie toward home plate at Jacobs Field for game two of the 2007 American League Divisional Series between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians. The Indians had demolished the Yankees the night before in game one, scoring twelve runs on fourteen hits.
Game two was a different story. Yankee veteran pitcher Andy Pettitte gave up six hits in the first six innings but somehow never allowed the Indians to put a rally together. Cleveland pitcher Fausto Carmona was sharper, allowing just two hits through six, but one of those hits was a solo home run by Yankee center fielder Melky Cabrera.
Pettitte started the seventh inning with a one-run lead. The first batter, Ryan Garko, fouled out to first base. Then Cleveland shortstop Jhonny Peralta doubled, followed by a walk to left-fielder Kenny Lofton, putting the potential go-ahead run on base. Yankees manager Joe Torre had seen enough. He signaled to the bullpen for young phenom pitcher Joba Chamberlain.
Chamberlain was just twenty-two years old. He had appeared in only nineteen major league games, but the hard-throwing rookie was on an incredible roll. In the twenty-four innings he had pitched for the Yankees during the regular season, he had struck out thirty-four of the seventy-eight batters he’d faced and had allowed only one earned run. He had electric stuff, was unhittable really, and many saw in him a future superstar. So Torre decided to roll the dice and see whether his budding superstar was up to preserving the Yankees’ lead.
At first, Torre’s confidence in Chamberlain seemed justified. He struck out Indians pinch-hitter Franklin Gutierrez on three pitches. It took only two pitches to induce the next batter to pop out to right field. The score remained 1–0 after seven innings. When Chamberlain returned to the mound at the start of the eighth inning, however, he had to face an annoyance of epic proportions. A swarm of insects descended on Jacobs Field.
According to the Associated Press, the insects were gnatlike creatures known as midges. They might have been the nonbiting midge known as
Even if a magnifying glass had been handy, Chamberlain would not have been likely to appreciate the midges’ feathery antennae and scale-free wings at that particular moment. All he was conscious of was that these bugs were everywhere. What the midges lack in their ability to annoy people with an itchy bite, they make up for in sheer numbers. “Probably millions of them,” says David Denlinger, an entomologist at Ohio State University. October is late in the year to see swarms of midges, but the proximity of Lake Erie to the stadium and the warm temperatures at game time probably explain the unseasonable swarm.
“Those are basically mating swarms,” says Denlinger. “The major composition of that swarm is probably going to be males looking for mates. And then the females will enter the swarm and get mated, and they don’t hang around very long.”
