Here I am participating in a challenge by my friend Dragos. All in fun, he came up with the idea of inviting some of us to play a game by writing an article. You can read the rules on his blog post How To Get From A To B In Five Random Steps. The rules of the game are simple:

You pick two words, which are the start point and the endpoint. Those words can represent things, concepts, actions, whatever your want. Then you force your mind to find 5 ways to get from A (the start point) to B (the endpoint). Those 5 steps must have something in common but they aren’t forced to follow any logical blueprint. You are the one who creates the connection between the steps. Doesn’t matter if it’s something very personal, as long as it does retain a semantic link along the way. And you must go through only 5 steps, not 4, not 6. A chain of 5 semantic links between 2 concepts.

Dragos, I accept your challenge!

So I am trying to come up with two random things. The rules state that I can pick anything that’s on my mind. So I decided to pick two of the things that annoy me most. Partly for the reason that I have to deal with both on a daily basis. They are not related to one another except for the fact that they are both highly annoying.

Preface

One of the biggest irritations to me right now are the garbage trucks that come by every morning around 5:30. Every day of the week. I live in a rather quiet street, and it’s not really loud except for the times when our neighbor’s kids are playing outside – but that is not a disturbance at all. The garbage trucks are. Try waking up to the beautiful sound of trash dispensers clashing against each other (bam bam bam), glass breaking (chirr chirr chirr), and the big fat garbage truck backing up (beep beep beep). As a conclusion, my starting point (A) will be garbage trucks.

The second biggest annoyance to me is my internet service provider. Yes, I admit – I’m with AOL. To be more accurate, AOL owns my a**. They are literally the worst ISP around – not only are they unreliable and far too expensive for the service they provide, but the AOL software completely takes over your system. Toolbars, a new media player, an unreliable anti-virus application, games, shortcuts to their affiliates on your desktop, advertising splattered all over your screen, and dozens of other programs that clog up your system and often enough even prevent other, legitimate software from functioning correctly. My ending point (B) will be AOL.

So let’s get started.

1. Garbage trucks

Our starting point. I have already noted my reasoning to pick these things above.

2. Sleep

This is only logical, and the biggest reason I went with garbage trucks as a starting point. Garbage trucks result in a loss of sleep, interrupted sleep, and, as a result, fatigue.

3. Caffeine

To combat the fatigue that rises up from sleep deprivation, which was caused by our garbage trucks, we commonly make use of things like a cold shower – or, for better effects, caffeine. Our weapon of choice for the latter may be coffee or tea; it’s usually one out of the two. Caffeine pumps you up and compensates for your tiredness. Very effective.

4. Wired

If you have too much caffeine, which is very easy to accomplish thanks to the garbage trucks, you become wired. You may start to experience shakiness, jitteriness, and nervosity. You are hyper-alert – or at least you think you are; nothing can really compensate for a lack of sleep.

5. AOL

And so we arrive at the ending point. I hope I don’t need to explain the connection between wired and AOL. On the other hand, we have to distinguish between the perception of wired and actually being wired… With America Online, you’d usually fall into the former case. One might even call it garbage.

I picked garbage trucks and AOL for a reason. We are currently looking for a new house to move into, and we have already decided that we will not move into an area where we can hear the street noise in our bedroom – meaning we need to have enough space between the house and the street. And, of course, we will pick a different service provider than AOL for our internet connection. That means throwing every single AOL CD that will arrive in our mail straight into the garbage can.

Now looking at the correlation between AOL CDs filling up the trash, and garbage trucks, we could have technically jumped all steps in-between A and B, and connect the two directly. Geez.