1)  The crying sound of baby Mario in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. In this sequel to the original Super Mario World you play as Yoshi carting little baby Mario around on your back, trying your best to maneuver the Island and avoid baby Bowser and Magikoopa Kamek’s traps. Every time you get injured in Super Mario World 2 baby Mario flies off your back and into a bubble on the game screen, crying hysterically. You have to pop the bubble he is in to get him back and not “die.” The sound baby Mario makes is worse than a normal baby cry, it’s an 8bit, brain-melting yelp of never-ending torment. It will burrow itself into your brain. It will make you claw your eardrums. It is one of the most annoying sounds ever conceived in this world.

2) The sound of a train horn . I understand why train horns exist. I understand they are largely used for the safety of the train and for cars on the road. I understand they are probably supposed to be really loud and annoying so that they are sufficiently effective. I understand they are a warning. None of this makes me hate the sound any less. I’m trying to imagine the laboratory where they came up with the sound for a train horn and I imagine the inventors were all bitter, jaded men who were bullied in school and subsequently held a grudge against human life so they came up with this sound to inflict as much pain as possible on the populace of earth for treating them with anything less than Deity-like awe and wonder. They are terrible men. But they are, of course, having the last laugh.

3) Automatic garbage trucks. Again, I understand that no one really intended for this noise to ruin lives. Nobody specifically set out to create a crawling, lumberous behemoth with steel jaws and automatic garbage pickup arms that, when put together, creates the sound that I imagine a sexually frustrated Tyrannosaurus Rex probably made. If we could scientifically recreate the sound a now-extinct Dino smashing everything in its path trying to get some hot Dino tail would make, I imagine it is close to the sound the automatic garbage truck outside my apartment makes at 6am seemingly EVERY DAY. It doesn’t just pick up the trash and throw it in its open end, it beeps, it gargles, it revs, it bumps into things, it drops the canister, it backs up again, it crunches bones, PBR cans, lamps, metal and whatever other mysterious stuff ends up in the garbage of a large apartment complex which I hope to God I never become cognizant of all while the engine purrs with all the quietness of a Boeing 747. The bane of my existence, I curse thee.