Rob LeDonne

When it comes to letting a friend know you’re outside their building, there’s only one right way to buzz. Sadly, most New Yorkers get it all wrong. RECOMMENDED: See more New York rants Some overeager, maniacal folks mercilessly smash the button for an ungodly length of time, making dogs bark and babies cry and rattling residents to their very core. Others buzz in a relentless staccato. These twitchy ne’er-do-wells tap-tap-tap the button as if they’re sending an urgent, coded message to their only ally in a dangerous game of international intrigue. In this same population, but perhaps worse, are the would-be composers who use the button to create a little ditty. Ladies and gentlemen, no version of “Shave and a Haircut” is ever appropriate. But the short, single buzz is the most infuriating of all. Here, overcautious weirdos alight their index finger on the button just once—for a millisecond, tops—as if they were a member of the terrorized family in A Quiet Place. Of course, the USPS has perfected this technique: You may have taken off work to receive a special package, but you’ll never hear your courier’s buzz—really, he just doesn’t want to bother you. So, what’s the right way to  treat this maddening button? A single, two-second-long buzz, followed by 15 seconds of blissful silence, then—maybe—a follow-up buzz. Anything else and you owe everyone in the building a hot cocoa.

It’s a predicament that strikes dread into the hearts of even the most-hardened New Yorkers: You’re gallivanting around the city when, all of a sudden, nature calls. Say a prayer and brace yourself: Public-restroom options in this town are grim. A coffee shop, which is very, very close to an actual public restroom, could work… if only the line for its sole unisex restroom didn’t stretch around the block like the latest Supreme merch just went on sale. You may as well go ahead and queue up a a few hour-long podcasts for your endless wait in lavatory purgatory: You can bet your life that the person ahead of you is about to spend 10 minutes washing their hands. Then, maybe, there’s the nearby restaurant adorned with a handwritten sign alerting you that the facilities are FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY! Now you have to put on a show to convince the wary host that you’re considering eating there, paging through the menu before hightailing it to the water closet, then sprinting out as if you’ve just robbed a bank. Once you finally realize your glorious goal of making it inside one of the Big Apple’s rare, bona fide public bathrooms, behold the disaster zone of strewn toilet paper and puddles so unspeakable they could well merit a helicopter visit from the Red Cross. Your next stop after doing the deed? Your therapist’s office, to emotionally unpack the whole ordeal.

I would wager that there’s no place on God’s green—err, asphalt—earth where it’s more annoying to receive a package than in New York City. Whether an overpriced West Elm nightstand or an Amazon Prime amalgamation of flaxseed, socks and Infinite Jest, you better pray you’re actually home when that hapless delivery person arrives. If not, be prepared to drown in a sea of missed-package notices that eventually blanket your door like New Year’s Eve confetti in Times Square. Then, you’re in for a mind-numbing trip to your local post office or, gulp, the “processing facility” on the extreme outskirts of town, a rouse that’s almost certainly a setup for your murder. RECOMMENDED: See more New York rants Of course, your overworked and underpaid delivery person, might also just throw fate to the wind and plop your package on your stoop. When you get that delivery notification, you better run home faster than if you were in the New York City Marathon. If you make it, the euphoria you experience when you finally grip your safe-and-sound package is perhaps only comparable to the best sex you’ve ever had. If you don’t, be prepared to live through the whole nightmare tomorrow. Is it all worth it for a stupid nightstand?

Deep in Bushwick, it’s the middle of the night, and you’re a toxic combination of exhausted and tipsy. Wanting to get back to your apartment in Harlem, you are loathe to put what’s left of your life at the mercy of the capricious, indifferent MTA. So, you opt for Uber, and while you could make believe you’re high society and order a car all for yourself, you just paid $50 for three drinks at a hipster cocktail bar. With that in mind, you select uberPool—a whopping $6 less than a solo vehicle. RECOMMENDED: See more New York rants After sliding into a car that wreaks of tacos and cologne, you immediately set off in the exact opposite direction of where you want to go. Heading to Harlem from Bushwick? You’ll have to backtrack to Bensonhurst, after which, still captive, you will bounce through time and space—that is, Astoria, Alphabet City and Chelsea—like a demonic game of Pac-Man. Naturally, when your ride isn’t sitting in standstill traffic on the West Side Highway, it’s zigzagging through the streets of Greenwich Village at a speed that would make Danica Patrick carsick. To make matters worse, this somber, meditative hour now includes surge pricing, that dastardly upcharge which the devil himself created in the bowels of hell. In the end, you will not save any money at all. As your dead-in-the-eyes driver blasts a psyops-worthy soundtrack of Baha Men deep cuts, your fellow uberPoolers don’t help matters: A plastered NYU sophomore is yelling into her phone at her insane boyfri

Despite its romanticization in film and on TV, fall in the Big Apple can be one of the most trying times of the year. Largely, that’s thanks to one thing: the insane weather. RECOMMENDED: See more New York rants The ordeal begins when you wake up to find temperatures have dropped overnight faster than a lightweight after a Lower East Side bar crawl. Bundled in flannels and a coat, you leave your cozy apartment and head to the subway only to find that the packed platform didn’t get the chilly-weather memo. (Looking at you, Eighth Avenue L  station.)  Drenched in more sweat than if you had just completed back-to-back SoulCycle classes, you frantically shed your clothes—only to have to pile ’em back on once you emerge from underground. Once you finally arrive at the office, you discover that some parts of the building are still in summer mode, with air conditioners cranked to the Arctic tundra setting, while others are akin to walking into a blazing toaster oven. Fed up, you flee to the street while still sporting multiple layers, only to realize that as the day has progressed, the morning’s shiver-inducing temperatures have somehow risen to mid-July heatstroke  levels. The most evil aspect of the entire experience unfolds the next day, when you assume you’ve finally outsmarted the season by wearing summer attire but get caught in the opposite weather pattern, with temperatures warm in the morning and then plummeting, causing you to sprint home, underdressed and freezing, while

Moving to a new home isn’t an enjoyable experience in most cities, but in New York—thanks to a real estate market designed by Satan, residential buildings ideally proportioned for wee fairy folk and the ubiquitous presence of movers’ oldest and most relentless foe: walk-ups—it will you leave you traumatized. RECOMMENDED: See more New York rants When an impending move is on the horizon, people start calculating commute times between different subway stops with a mad frenzy and volatile attention to detail, Beautiful Mind–style. They become obsessed with trying to figure out if anyone they know has a car—or if they even knowv anyone who can drive at all. On tear-drenched sidewalks, couples half-heartedly try to pull apart metal bed frames with no hope of passing them through unforgiving prewar stairwells. Sooner or later, moving day comes for us all. The ordeal usually begins once you’ve finally packed all of your worldly posessions into the cheap cardboard boxes you carried home from your corner bodega. Then it’s time to cart all that clutter to the truck parked three blocks away, the closest spot you could find as your street once again doubles as a set for Law and Order: SVU. Next up is the extremely slow and relentlessly horrifying adventure that is driving a large vehicle in New York. Once you finally arrive at your new home, you’re forced to enact a sick and twisted mirror image of that morning’s events: unloading the truck and forcing your tired shell of a body to carr

As the city's thermometers hit triple digits, many folks get the same idea: Venture to one of the metropolitan area’s sunny beaches. But while the Big Apple does many things well, between its wondrous bagels and remarkably edible dollar pizza slices, New York’s beaches are, unfortunately, not on that list. RECOMMENDED: See more New York rants A classic NYC beach day typically kicks off with the epic trek to get there, since the few beaches the city has to offer might as well be in Siberia for most New Yorkers. After the journey, whether it involved being stuck in endless traffic, roasting like a rotisserie chicken on a snarled train or dodging screaming children on a packed beach bus, sand seekers are usually zapped by the stress it took to arrive. Then the real pitfalls start to pile on like garbage on a restaurant-packed street: Sure, the city’s beaches have sand, but if you’re expecting the smooth stuff, think again. Prepare to gingerly step through the sharp and rocky variety. Want to take a scenic walk? A jaunt along the shore involves a minefield of junk; visitors can expect to dodge everything from Nathan’s Famous wrappers to hypodermic needles and beer cans. And if you think a dip in the water provides a welcome respite, you’re sadly mistaken—unless you’re into weak surf and bone-chilling temperatures. Despite all of the above, you’re typically also forced to push through massive crowds made of hapless tourists and exasperated residents, all forming snaking lines for

Written by Rob LeDonne It can happen anywhere, even on the bucolic streets of gentrified Williamsburg or the cobblestoned arteries of the ungodly overpriced Meatpacking District. All of a sudden, they charge down the street like a team of greasy horses: motorcycles. Thundering out of the blue and disrupting the peace of everyone in their nefarious paths, they fly by as if to say, “We have arrived, everyone snap to attention and take note!” RECOMMENDED: See more New York rants Whether in a pack or cruising solo, motorcycles emit sound that echoes through the streets with fury and arrogance, much like the jackhammering from a construction project of that future high-rise you won’t be able to afford. Even better, they seem to always strike at the exact wrong times. Trying to put your baby to sleep? Vroom, there’s one outside! Taking a leisurely walk down the block? Vroom, there’s one right behind you! Just about to tell your girlfriend that you want to take a break? Vroom, one sneaks up behind you, and you put the break off for another year. Recently, a friend mentioned that motorcycle’s intense noise doubles as a safety precaution. This could be true, but I’m skeptical since I know how most motorcyclists like to ride: weaving in and out of traffic at high speeds and acting as if stop signs were invisible. If safety were indeed paramount, motorcyclists everywhere would trade in their noisy machines for that incredible invention known as an enclosed automobile. Of course, a mo