Hosting companies that tell you to install your own tools and then, while you are installing said tools, go ahead and install them themselves in an entirely different place -- immediately breaking everything you have just spent the last three hours of your very limited free time beating into submission.

That irks me.

futzing with windows machines .. it always takes much, much longer than I expect .. It should be simple but sometimes some of the configuration settings (and locations) never make sense, and this is after using a windows box regularly for work over the last 10 years.

I'm sure its mostly because I'm a mac person at home and have been spoiled but perhaps its just subconscious resentment ;)

Object orientated software development. I have a blindspot for anything to do with OO programming or memory assignment or duplication of bitwise doodahs.

How I get away with doing it for a living I'll never know!

"Helpful" features that try to make you do what Microslosh thinks you should do/say/write instead of what you have said/written ....

Documentation indices where you have to guess what their magic word is to find information. You look under "save" and "write" and find nothing. Annoyed, you try "store". Nada. Hmmmm... "put", maybe? Nope. In desperation, you try "cache" and any other distantly related synonym you can think of. Six weeks later, you stumble across what you were looking for under "stash" while searching for something completely unrelated.

I could air the laundry list, however it would look like a whinge :)

The worst one I had recently was upgrading a RAID controller's firmware using vendor's upgrade utility. The flash utility then proceeded to helpfully brick a $1500 fibre-channel expansion cards, just because the two different devices happen to be made by the one manufacturer.

I was not particularly amused by this. It took me the best part of 1/2 a day to un-brick it.

Oh, and power, UPS' and air conditioning. They all suck :)

LDAP. Yeah I used to sit down the hall from its inventor, and even have my name on an RFC related to LDAP and mail delivery, but it's so painfully archaic. Oh AnD I reAlLy hAtE CaMeLcaSE.

Microsoft.

ISP who, when the service is down, directs your support call to a recording which advises you to "check our internet page for an update".....