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Idiom: Push your buttons
The people who know you best are the same ones who know how to push your buttons.
There are quite a few benefits to having close friends and family, but there are also downsides.
These people you call friends can say and do minor little things that will get your goat every time.
When people push your buttons, they can irritate or exasperate you.
They often do it purposefully to laugh at you and your anger.
After all, isn’t that what friends are for?
As I was growing up, my family was compartmentalized.
I mean that my four sisters were always treated as one unit, and I, the first born and only boy, was treated as a separate one.
I always had a room to myself, for example, whereas the girls had to bunk together.
My four sisters were always, and I mean all day, every day, fighting, bickering and pushing each other’s buttons.
If one sister had a crush on another boy or said she liked a guitarist in Bon Jovi, the others would tease her to no end.
Then, of course, there was Nintendo. Wait, before that, we had a Pong game that could be played on a TV set.
My father controlled the TV in the living room, so there was no chance of playing any video games there.
That meant the girls got a TV in their room, which determined where the video games went.
Did I ever mention I never played video games as a kid?
Anyway, if one sister paused a game to answer the phone or something, one of the others would turn off the game on purpose just to push her buttons.
They enjoyed watching each other become angry.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 76.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.