People that have annoyed me this week

• UPS. Having been given the correct delivery address, they ignored the name of the block of flats, and have been attempting to deliver my shiny new laptop to a house down the road.


• Carr Greenwood Smith (loss adjusters) / The Revival Company / EW Beard (builders). They never ring back, preferring to wait for the other party to ring back. When I finally tracked down someone who might give me an estimated date for starting work, he suggested I call him back next year.


• A coworker in the US. He included the abominations "may not of" and "may of" in an email to a customer. What kind of signals is that sending about our competence, eh? He should be grateful that there's an ocean in the way to prevent me from wringing his neck.

There are all those little bits of pedantry that you can apply to pick holes in somebody else's writing. (I know that by writing about this I've jinxed the whole post and somebody is likely to spot a really glaring example.) Things like using a superlative when comparing two items, or ending a sentence with a preposition - I only found out about these by reading the rules that explicitly forbid them. There are split infinitives, which don't really bother me, but I've observed one reader of this journal wincing when he hears one. Then there are the ones that are quite obviously wrong to anyone taking a moment to think about what the words mean.
One day in an English lesson, we were covering a few of these. (I think this part of the lesson was there to stop us from making such stupid mistakes in GCSEs, which would make me 15 at the time.) The teacher asked "how many of you have done this?" and wrote on the board "could of". I was the only person that didn't put a hand up.
I genuinely never made that mistake. Maybe it's because I had a comparatively posh accent, and pronounced things nearer to their spelling than my classmates did. Maybe it's because my mother gave us all some basic spelling, punctuation and grammar training under the guise of "fun word games". (Does anyone else remember The Sunflower Book? I can't remember its real name, but it had a lot of rules, exercises, and comprehensions.) Maybe it's because I spent all my spare time reading books. But nobody believed me - even the teacher was sceptical. What, did they want me to lie to fit in?
Since that point, every time I've seen it written down, I've wanted to thump the author. It's frustrating even when it's done in jest - Pratchett sometimes writes it that way in direct speech, which (I assume) is meant to show that the character has missed this important part of their education - as it just increases the number of printed occurrences, in turn increasing the chances of somebody seeing it in print and thinking that it's correct.