Gulp! – You swallowed 40,000 times.

I hate Achievements.
If there was an XBOX 360 setting where you could turn off Achievements for all games then I would choose it. But there isn't, and you're stuck with them and I hate them.
There are three main reasons for this. The first is that I only play single-player games. I play for the experience, for the story, for the atmosphere. All of which is completely ruined the moment a “plink!” unwelcomely thrusts itself between myself and the game world. For me, it's like watching The Sixth Sense and having a little banner suddenly appear at the bottom of the screen saying “Ghosties! – You've seen 2 dead people.” – utterly incongruous and distracting.
Secondly, why do I care that I've done 100 headshots? Why do I care that I've finished the first level of the game on a certain difficulty level? I don't keep a tally of how many times I blow my nose in a day or how many times I successfully navigate from my desk to the toilet and back so that I can get bonus Nectar points. It's irrelevant, trivial detail that's been raised to an artificial level of importance by awarding abstract points for completing these non-events. Now every player is supposed to be an obsessive compulsive hoarder. Now the Achievements lists are released before the game just so people can prep themselves for the point hunt ahead. It's the ultimate high score table with no actual skill involved.
The final reason is again because I only play single-player games. I don't enjoy competitive multiplayer experiences, which is now what every single XBOX 360 game has been turned into whether it wants to be or not. It's the constant, nagging feeling of inadequacy that gets me. A throbbing pain behind my temples telling me “You're not as good as them…” when I discover I'm somewhere around 8 millionth in the world in the Achievement points score table metagame. “Oh look, Jason has 450 more 'points' on game X than I do.” It doesn't bother me, yet deep down it really really does. I don't want it to, because after all it's a bloody story-based RPG. Yet it does. Then I end up spending hours trying to find the final two things and repeatedly performing a special attack move just to get the points, completely ruining the experience so I can be arbitrarily “better” at it than someone else.
So come on Microsoft, where is that 'Achievements Active' toggle? I'd pay £30 a month just for that…
And if you hate Achievements as much as I do you'll love the utter pointlessness of Achievement Unlocked.