Entries Tagged as 'California'
Christine in San Rafael, California says Sol Food is “literally the best thing about San Rafael.” One reason, she says? The restaurant “keeps this gem of a note right where it belongs — on display in the glass cabinet outside the front door, where most restaurants would keep a menu.”
Seeing as the note has been up for about a year and half so far, it seems Angelo’s threat hasn’t caused much concern. In fact, Christine says, “the place is so popular that it always has a line out the door, which (bonus!) allows me to read it over and over again.”

(See the lime-green exterior for yourself here and here.)
related: Wrath mat
Tags: "helpful" advice · a matter of taste · Bay Area · California · Marin · not-so-veiled threats · oh no you didn't · Puerto Rico · restaurant · San Rafael
Dealing with the rantings of your crazy boss or overzealous receptionist is one thing, but what do you do when your office’s resident passive-aggressive note-leaver doesn’t even work there? Casey in San Diego (a.k.a. RunBarbara) says that’s the situation she’s found herself in at her job.
The offender, Sandra, “has met me a total of twice, both times for less than a minute,” Casey says. Yet for some reason, when Sandra (the aunt of the owner) stops by the office once a week to water the plants and drop off supplies, “she leaves these strange notes EVERYWHERE — and she almost always directs questions about said notes to me,” Casey says. “I often have no idea she posts these notes until someone asks me about the odd directions in them.”
Below, a small sampling of Sandra’s delightfully bizarrre directives. (Just click on the photos to enlarge.)


I’d like to think this note was posted immediately following the “potluck”…

related: The return of Thx Sandra!
Tags: bathroom · battle of the sexes · blitzkrieg approach · California · CAPS LOCK · clip art catastrophe · crazypants · dubious scientific claims · exclamation-point happy!!!! · gloriously redundant · most popular notes of 2008 · office cop · party planning committee · San Diego · spelling and grammar police · thx · toilet · unnecessary "quotation marks" · vomit · You call that punctuation?
“I work for a pretty awesome non-profit, where people are amazingly laidback, accepting and non-OCD,” says our anonymous submitter in San Francisco — so this note came as something of a surprise.

Adds our submitter: “I have to admit, seeing the newspaper on top of the toilet tank the previous week had kinda gotten on my nerves too.”
related: oh dear
Tags: CAPS LOCK · newspaper · office · San Francisco · toilet
Sure, it’d be easier and quicker to just clean it up. But the modern passive-aggressive (like Katey in Berkeley’s ex-roommate) can’t pass up the opportunity to make a point.

A common variation on the Van der Rohe approach, as documented below by Sam in Dallas, is the so-called “Reverse Magritte.”

Meanwhile, post-modern passive-aggressives (like this New York office-worker below) can’t resist throwing some irony into the mix, intentional or not.

More recently, passive-aggressives have begun to show the influence of the burgeoning neo-pop movement. Our anonymous submitter in Houston, for example, designed the original stamp below for use in his work. “I am an engineer and we have to mark up technical drawings for manufacture,” he explains, in his artist’s statement. “It gets used at least twice a day.”

The bleeding-edge of passive-aggressive note-writing, however, lies on the west coast, where Rebecca in San Francisco says that in the past, “We’ve had an ongoing series of notes left in the office kitchen — usually of the ‘your mother doesn’t work here’ or ‘there is no such thing as the coffee fairy’ variety.” The Koons-inspired piece currently on display in the office breakroom, however, makes its point with no words at all.

related: Why-fi
Tags: actions speak louder · art · Berkeley · cleaning · Houston · New York · Oakland · obnoxious definition · office · roommates · San Francisco · WTF?
With finals and thesis deadlines coming up, stress levels among grad students at UC-Berkeley have been running high (which means attention to the finer points of, say, apostrophe use, are running low). And now there’s a lunch thief on the loose!

Sadly, says our submitter, the note’s multi-pronged approach (guilt, threats, helpful advice) seems to have had no effect; the lunch thief remains at large. The next course of action? “We’re considering planting laxative-laced desserts.”
related: It must have been a pretty big bite
Tags: apostrophe abuse · Berkeley · California · college life · food · fridge · kitchen · preggers · stealing · the homeless · warning
Ellen in San Francisco says this note is but the latest development in what has become a toilet paper-thin relationship with her passive-aggressive roommate. It started two months ago, she says, when her roommate “decided after six months of sharing that I was no longer allowed to use her toilet paper. I should mention that she never once asked me to chip in for toilet paper, and I never really had an opportunity to buy more because she bought it in bulk and we always had a huge supply.”
Ellen obliged “until this morning, when nature called and I had just run out.” When Ellen got home, this work of art (my favorite line: “now that we’ve settled this”) was waiting for her.

Adds Ellen: “Funnier still is that this roommate freaked out on another roommate for leaving a note. She yelled at her, ‘If you have a problem with me, talk to me, don’t leave me a note. Be an adult about it!’ Nice to see she followed her own advice.”
related: it always comes down to the toilet paper
Tags: bathroom · money · paper product fairy · roommates · San Francisco · smiley · toilet paper
What’s employee morale like inside Yahoo’s Sunnyvale headquarters, amid all the chatter about coming layoffs, the possible Microsoft takeover, and everything else? well, according to one anonymous Yahoo! employee, in the toilet would be one place to look.
Says our Yahoo! tipster: “First they took away our right to stand on the toilets. Then they took away our right to surf on the john. But now — they’ve gone too far.”

related: Yahoo! — Servicing over a half-billion people…each and every day
Tags: California · CAPS LOCK · group bitchfest · office · raging against the machine · saga · Silicon Valley · toilet · Yahoo
OMG, ramekin drama! (from San Francisco, natch…)
(click to enlarge!)

related: #54 kitchen gadgets [stuffwhitepeoplelike.com]
Tags: excessive underlining · meta · moving/not moving · San Francisco