By Joey Mills

Suffering from allergies is really no fun. While you can keep the pollen away with our great range of HayMax products, it can still be an annoyance. Therefore I’m here to take your mind off things with a list of things you should be worried about instead. So sit forward, grit your teeth and get ready to rage with our list of things that blight our lives much more than those pesky allergens.

1) Clickbait

Chances are if you’ve dared venture to any website that isn’t this glorious haven of relief, you have encountered the scourge of clickbait. You know those links with titles like “17 convenient ways to house train your penguin: YOU WON’T BELIEVE NUMBER 13!” or “I made £300 a second just for growing a moustache. FIND OUT HOW!” When you click on them you always get hundreds of pop-ups, a computer virus and no helpful penguin-care tips whatsoever. These infuriating ads offer false promises, waste vital time you could be using to procrastinate, and make your computer run slower than Adam Richman after a Man vs Food challenge.

2) Talking about the weather

Definitely a distinctly British trait this one, so let me fill in the blanks for any of our overseas allergy-family. It might be normal to comment on the weather if something particularly noteworthy has occurred. I’m fine with statements such as “The dog swam past me wearing a snorkel this morning, I think we may have been flooded” or “did my house used to have a roof?” But in Britain we take meteorological banter to a nauseating degree.

The other day I actually had someone say to me “this weather is mild, it doesn’t know what to do today!” as if our climate is a sentient being. Well you’re right “person I’m going to write an insulting blog post about”, it doesn’t know what it’s going to do. Because it’s weather and it doesn’t have thoughts, feelings or emotions. If anyone reading this is from a country that doesn’t assign a living consciousness to moderately warm conditions please send me a visa and a plane ticket.

3) Working in retail

This one hits close to home for me personally, and without having stood behind the counter and had someone actually say the words “oh it didn’t scan, does that mean its free?” for the 400th time that day you may not know why this has made it onto our list.

Like a bleary-eyed war veteran returning from conflict I have truly seen it all in my time as a counter-jockey. People trying to return clothing they’ve bled on? Check. Customer’s shoe sizes changing four times in the same transaction before they finally take your advice and buy some the same size as the pair they already have on? Check. People trying to follow you into the stockroom just to “double check” you weren’t lying about not having their size? Check mate.

This shop is not run inside a correctional facility either, this is an actual retail outlet and these are members of the general public who behave this way. Take your hayfever and be grateful guys, it could be so much worse!

4) Social Media

From something only the unluckiest members of the populace have experienced to something most of us do by choice. Social media at its core is an exceptional idea. It allows us to stay connected to our nearest and dearest no matter the geographical distance. However like with every great discovery in human history we’ve pushed it off a cliff to see what happens when it hits the ground. I like food as much as the next person, but I can’t say I’m overly fussed what the girl who used to sit behind me in Year 9 Geography had for breakfast. But there’s her scrambled eggs all over my Facebook feed!

However the worst child of the Social Media family must surely be the meme. Memes are basically ransom notes with cute pictures. “Like this cat and you’ll have good luck. Ignore it and we’ll put him in an envelope!” Remember people, an animal is for life not just for extorting people into clicking on a picture of a thumb to make you feel like you have friends.

5) Not having an allergy

A bizarre entry to close the show here but think about it. Without your allergy you wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t have just spent 10 minutes reading this. Do you really want to live in a world like that? Do you? DO YOU? Thought not. Keep the pollen in check with HayMax, and keep checking back for more blogs!