Things That Irritate Me: Leaf Blowers

They're really fucking loud, they use a petroleum product, and the task they perform can be done nearly as easily with a rake. Seriously, people: I can almost (almost) see the justification for snow blowers, in some places, for some people, given the number of people who have heart attacks shoveling and given the amount of shoveling that a high-rise building engineer (for example) might have to do otherwise, but nobody's gonna get a heart attack from raking the leaves.