I’ve recently realized that I’ve been accumulating a whole bunch of little irritants in my life over the last few months, without really noticing them creeping up on me. Even more pathetic, I’ve developed little workarounds for each one. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about?

- I’d been living in the condo for 8 months, before I got the neighborhood parking vignette. After a while I thought nothing of parking one or two streets away from my house, though there was always a free spot right out front.

- I don’t have a recycling bin. To take out the recycling, I wait for the weeks when I remember to bring a cardboard box home from work. Other weeks, it accumulates in Ikea bins in my study.

- My dryer makes a soul-wrenching noise. I dry my clothes in short bursts, stopping the dryer when the noise starts, hoping the clothes will have time to dry before it does. They never do.

- One of the headlights on my car is out (workaround pending).

- My phone, the shittiest model offered by Fido, turns itself off automatically about three times a day. I tell people to use e-mail to contact me.

- My desk is almost the only piece of furniture in my office. Everything that should be filed in drawers or stored on shelves accumulates on it.

I’m taking next week off, and resolve to use it to fix every one of those issues.

What about you? Am I the only one who repeatedly takes these stupid little “life workarounds”, when a targeted solution would remove the problem?