“My roommate thinks I took her dry erase board when I was 40 miles away the week it was taken,” says an anonymous college student in Tampa, Florida. “She has been leaving me notes like this ALL YEAR.”
God help our poor submitter, but I’m nominating this crazy rainbow of a note for the passive-aggressive hall of fame. (Prize: a year’s worth of anger-management therapy?)
Nothing could have prepared Lauren in Oakland for the passive-aggressive avalanche that awaited her the other day at her new apartment. She calls the experience of finding the notes totally surreal. “It keeps playing back in slow motion in my mind, from the second I saw the first one hanging over the threshold to my absolute horror and delight at finding an eleventh one hours later on the bathroom door.” Here’s the theme park version!
“I’m not sure anything in particular prompted it,” Lauren says, “but I live, apparently, in some kind of alternate dimension where full-grown adults believe in chore-wheels, so it could’ve been anything — but certainly not ELEVEN things to correspond with the number of found notes. Then again, I’m not a timebomb waiting to explode, so how would I know?”
Joe in Northern Virginia has amassed a pretty divine collection of office fridge notes over the years, the best of which portend various forms of karmic/economic/physical retribution.
My own neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn has high concentrations of dogs, babies, crazies and bloggers, which makes for a heady brew of incredibly well-documented passive-aggressiveness. Certain notes (like this long-running series) show up in my inbox over and over again. I’ve gotten various iterations of this note from no fewer than six different people over the past few months, with good reason.
I think the dogged persistence of the note-writer is pretty incredible in its own right, but even better is what the note doesn’t quite explain: these bags weren’t just being stolen — some “juvenile/adult delinquent” was also cutting the bottom of the bags, then putting them back for the next unsuspecting dog-walking victim. Oh, shit!
(Thanks to William, Kathleen, Elaine, Sarah, T-1-11, and JM for submitting!)
I think what fascinates me most about this e-mail, from the head of the party planning committee — excuse me, “fun fund” — at an office in Toronto, is the subject line. Not only does the writer ignore the obvious “let them eat cake,” she vetoes the direct approach (“hey, fatty”) in favor of the utterly nonsensical “for your records.”
Sounds like somebody in this Seattle office is havin’ a little ‘roid rage.
What’s Muscle Milk, you ask? Well, say its makers, “Muscle Milk is arguably America’s favorite protein.” Apparently because unlike, say, chicken, Muscle Milk comes in flavors like “egg nog,” “chocolate banana crunch” and “root beer float.”