My friend and I like to listen to the Crime Junkie podcast when we have a long drive. Only a few at a time, mind you. Then it becomes a little dark and you think every rest area has a murderer in the bathroom.

There’s no end to crime podcasts out there, mind you. What Crime Junkie does better than anyone else (except maybe Dateline) is turn it into a story where the reveal comes at the end or at the right moment. Other podcasts I’ve tried just start plodding through the data and bore the listener.

There are several Crime Junkie groups on reddit, of which I lurk and laugh. One of the best benefits has been a Crime Junkie bingo game which is hilarious but also further draws attention to some annoying things about the podcast. Repetitive sayings (“full body chills!”), quirks, typical reactions to things—you don’t notice the squeaky wheel, but once you do, it’s all you hear.

I will be honest.

Ashley, the main gal who started the podcast, doesn’t bother me too much. Britt, however, makes me want to tear my hair out. [She is currently not on the show due to a serious medical condition; her on/off replacement is equally as annoying.]

It’s in the rise of podcasts that you really begin to appreciate professional radio hosts who have learned to modulate their voice, carry on an interview, and keep things going.

We’ll be riding along, listening to Ashley weave the story and, ever since her little dance with plagiarism accusations, aggressively give the source for her information. Then Britt speaks up.

Gasps.

OMG.

What?!

Britt is probably a pretty nice person. She seems like she would be. But there’s something about her voice, her delivery, her comments. It’s oddly soft yet grating, and she often speaks in questions, with her voice rising at the end.

From what I can gather on reddit, Ashley has taken heat for not allowing Britt to be more involved so she’ll often find ways to have Britt participate more other than in mere exclamatory roles. She’ll have her read statements, describe police sketches, and do the voiceover for a lot of commercials.

Once you hear the thing that annoys you, you can’t unhear it. And I’ve heard Brit too many times.

“I want to go to the continuing ed people here in town and offer young women a class on how to speak declarative sentences!” I said in frustration to my friend. On the top of my pet peeves list are women who speak in questions despite their sentences being structured as a declaration. Are they too unsure of what they are about to say, and so they raise their inflection at the end of a sentence and turn it into a question instead?

I don’t know.

And Britt speaks in questions.

But getting past that are some of the other odd things I’ve heard come from her. Oh, Ashley says plenty (hence the bingo game made out of her favorite over-used phrases such as “lit up like a Christmas tree” and “full body chills”), but because I’m now prone to hone in on Britt, I catch those more.

For example, the tendency to insert personal experiences in life into every story even if it’s not about Britt at all. “I know for me blah blah blah so because of my experience that means yada yada yada.”

“This isn’t about you!” I scream at no one, hoping the podcasters could hear me anyway. My friend rolls his eyes. I’ve entered the age realm of hollering at televisions and radios.

Or even this doozy: the difference between the three stages of water: gas, liquid, solid.

The episode in question was about a woman who had gone missing from a church parking lot. Her car was there, and there seemed to be indication that she’d made her way to the edge of the water and gone in despite it being winter.

Just so you know, the police never search or respond the way crime podcasters think they ought to, and so Ashley and Britt were aghast at how they conducted the search for the missing woman.

At one point, Britt burst out in anger about the police response, saying something about the awfulness of the cold and of the woman drowning in frozen water.

“Frozen water is called ice, Britt!” I yelled at the truck dashboard. “No one drowns in ice!”

My friend just shook his head. “Maybe just let that go.”

But I cannot.

I must yell at the podcasters. Declaratively.