A parable of the state of the “hot dot-com” workplace in 2009: The story goes, according to our anonymous submitter in California, “that some executive-level person decided to put a pinball machine into our break area. After several months, someone must have complained about the noise, because a note went up telling us it was not to be played. When some employees decided to play the machine at 7 AM (assuming nobody in the building was in), the note was replaced by a new (more specific) note.”

After that, “the machine was unplugged and left to gather dust,” our submitter says…and to silently taunt all of the office’s embittered would-be pinball wizards. Until, one day…multiball!

related: “Popcorn Thursday”

Heather in Indianapolis is the kind of gal who helps out a pal who’s down on his luck. So when her marginally employed friend needed a place to crash while he got back on his feet, she let Greg live in her house and help himself to her food and other belongings, like her laptop, “pretty much rent-free,” for three months.

One day, after several hours spent trying to get rid of all the spyware on her computer  — thanks to all the porn sites she found in the browser history — she turned on parental controls. (A lil’ passive-aggressive? Maybe.) Then, when she forgot to log off one day, Greg removed them.

When Heather figured this out (after being bombarded by spyware once again) she added the parental controls back. And Greg — instead of saying something like, “Hey, did you realize those settings block stuff like Google and Careerbuilder?” — left her this charming note.

“According to this note,” Heather says, “in addition to all the horrible things I’ve done such as give him a place to live, let him eat my food, give him breaks on rent for months at a time and put up with his laziness, carelessness and filth, I have also DENIED HIM A SOCIAL LIFE! OMG!”

UPDATE: The back of the note!

Shoshana, it looks like you have some competition.

Our submitter in Dublin, California was leaving her apartment for work one morning when she found this syntactically-challenged note stuck to the door. “I assume my anonymous complaining neighbor has the wrong apartment number because A) My husband and I do not have children and B) For all but one of the dates listed no one was home to make any noise.”

She adds: ” We do, however, have other neighbors next door who are quite loud, and I’ve often been woken up to the sounds of moans, grunts and something heavy slamming into an adjoining wall.” (You know, just like that part in Big where they play pinball and jump on the trampoline!)

“When my husband saw this he laughed pretty hard and wondered aloud weather ‘kids jumping on the bed‘ was a euphemism for loud sex.”

related: Down and dirty down under (dear)

As an early holiday gift to you, I present the current leading candidate in the race for “douchecanoe of the year”…

UPDATE: Our anonymous tipster passes along this follow-up status update, adding, “The best part about this situation is that, by posting her latest status update, she just encouraged more people to come see how rude and greedy she is!”

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