Why your duvet cover never fits

Photo / Getty Images

There are two things that will always plague us: death and taxes. And Kardashians. And whether the plastic wrap is still on the Chesdale slice or not. So okay, there are more than two things. Know your enemies!

Duvet covers

Somewhere in the 90s a paradigm shift occurred and we all got duvets. It's certainly preferable to the old Victorian Orphanage set-up of sheets and blankets. You remember: the sheet always came untucked and tangled your legs, leading to dreams where you couldn't run, which were surprisingly scary considering you never do run. So a soft, warm duvet was welcomed into your life, even if the Aztec print didn't really go with your sunflower curtains. All seemed well until washday, when you were left with a skinned, floppy mattress-looking thing and a brightly coloured bag. How do you get the cover back on the duvet? It's 2017 and there are still YouTube video tutorials on how to get the duvet cover on, yet no one has invented a duvet that opens on two sides, because your suffering pleases the duvet spirits.

Aircon in hotel rooms

Unless you're a jaded business traveller or international pop star (in which case, well done), a hotel room is something of a luxury. The decor is fancy, you can stroll nude from bed to loo, and someone else has to clean up when you leave, which is lucky because bed and the loo weren't the only places you were nude. What you can't do is open a window, because if you can't be trusted to put pants on, you can't be trusted to shut the window when the aircon is on. So your room has a glass wall instead of a window, and the aircon is always on. Always. And the remote control, like all unfamiliar remotes, is suddenly a stick in the hands of you, a chimpanzee. You spend the night being freeze-dried like a gourmet raspberry, if gourmet raspberries gasped for real air that would never come. This is how they get you to pay those mini-bar prices, because after a night like that you deserve $7 Pringles.

Sneezing on the motorway

It's very seldom in life that we're allowed to control a 1-tonne metal machine travelling at terminal velocity. Wait, no it's not, it's every day, in the car. It's one of life's little quirks: we know we're fallible, capable of drunk tweets and putting our wallets in the microwave, but somehow we feel comfortable in charge of heavy machinery. There is no better reminder of our human frailty than a sneeze on the motorway. You feel it coming and your life flashes before your eyes, particularly the part where someone told you it's impossible to keep said eyes open during a sneeze. Your eyeballs pop out or something. You have the choice between being uncontrollably blind for a moment while travelling at 100km/h or having your eyeballs on your cheeks, which also sounds like an unsafe driving practice. You think of all the intense, limb-flailing sneezes of your life and wonder how you're not going to swerve violently off the road. Then you sneeze, it's over, you're safe; except for the fine film on the windscreen and the wet, snuffling knowledge the tissues are out of reach.

Spotify

How great are music streaming services? No more albums to buy, a world of artists to discover, everything you like at your fingertips. But what do you like? Something about endless choice makes you unable to remember any songs. You must have liked music at some point or you wouldn't have all those Moby CDs, but an empty search bar yawns before you, an abyss of the self, reminding you just how uncool you are. Spotify knows we're like this, which is why it makes so many of its own playlists, mercifully filling the aching gaps in our musical vocabulary.

Sure, you have to listen to what seems like 10,000 versions of the same droning acoustic indie folk-pop lament, but it's a small price to pay to pretend you have musical tastes ($14.99 a month).

Little empty shops

Sometimes you'll be browsing in an unfamiliar area and you'll suddenly find you've wandered into a little shop. And you're alone. At this point you realise that the shop is silent, without background music, not even a Spotify acoustic indie folk-pop playlist to drown out the shuffle of your feet and surprisingly loud breathing. The shop stocks things you're not interested in, or things that you are interested in but are staggeringly expensive. You've been seen by the assistant, so you have to pretend to have an admiring sift through the stock while making a subtle loop back towards the door. The shop could sell nothing but devices for getting the duvet back in the cover and you'd still be yelling "Thanks!" over your shoulder as you sprinted out the door.