Admittedly I am not the most confrontational person if the situation doesn’t fully merit it. Examples:
My upstairs neighbor who I SWEAR is a dead ringer for the uncle on Napoleon Dynamite (did anyone see the secret pic I took of him wearing the Karate Kid head band, muscle shirt and 70′s esque running shorts???) Anyway- the guy listens to his Rush nightly and at times the bass feels like it’s drilling into my head. I scream for him to turn it down, I’ll hit the wall, pound the ceiling with a broom stick or what ever happens to be in reach (sorry kitty…) ANYTHING to avoid just getting up and out of my comfort zone to walk up the stairs and ask “Can you please turn it down?”
Recently we had a new person move into the building. A younger guy who had NO clue how to park. I wish I captured how diagonal he’d park in relation to my car leaving me almost no room to get out of my own vehicle because his passenger side headlight was practically touching my driver’s side door.
Well I did what I normally do- something passive aggressive: I took my sketch pad and placed a series of notes in the window that faced his parking spot. The first one was simple “Did you flunk parking?” with a little diagram on it on the right way to park and the wrong way to park. Still no luck.
The second sign read: Please Read Parking for Dummies or Idiots or Morons or Really Slow People!
Viola! It worked!!! I looked out the window and for the first time in a month he parked correctly (see photo of his correct parking that has kept me from spilling the ink over the past month).
Of course after I saw this wonderful transformation in parking… I put a polite “Thank You =)” in the window.
I forgot about it until Nick sent me a link to passive aggressive notes.com to show me this funny posting and I gasped… OMG people JUST LIKE ME! (scary eh)? So I pulled out the pad and took pictures of my notes wishing I captured the moment. Oh well… now I know.
Current Mood:
Crazy!
I couldn’t help but laugh in spite of myself.
I say “in spite of myself” because the possibility of being subjected to angry notes was something that used to make me hate living in apartments. For a while we had a manager who would periodically post ALL-CAPS notes on colored paper on all of the residents’ doors (not just mine) which made me want not to go home after work. I remember that when I got home from work I would peep around the corner to see if there was one of these notes on my door, so that I could start psyching myself up before climbing the steps to my door.
I saved these notes for posterity, though I don’t know where to put my hands on them just at the moment, and they formed a topic of conversation for years thereafter.
From memory, though, one of them began, “IN MY 15 YEARS IN APARTMENT MANAGEMENT, I HAVE NEVER ENCOUNTERED RESIDENTS AS FILTHY AND DISGUSTING AS YOU.” She then continued in a similar vein for 3-4 paragraphs in order to fill up the page, though admittedly the rest of it didn’t have the same panache and punch as the opening sentence.
In another, she complained about the fact that after the dumpsters became full — which they did every week, since there were not enough of them on the premises — the residents would stack the trash next to the dumpster. This was bad, she said. She said that she was going to have the maintenance guys open up these bags, sort through the rubbish, and if they could find anything inside of the bags with residents’ apartment numbers in them, then they would come into our apartments and fling the rubbish inside the door.
But concerning the notes you wrote, I have just one question: where’s the “passive” part? (Joke! Joke! Don’t hit!) (Well, *partial* joke. I was forced to go look up “passive aggressive behavior” on wikipedia, and it turns out that what you were doing wasn’t actually what’s meant by passive-aggressive. Ergo, it’s just “aggressive”, even if you were justified.)
The passive being the avoidance aspect of it. I aggressively without force or assuring that my notes are even read- place it in a window not wanting confrontation but wanting results because I’m irked. Hence: Passive… aggressive. I wanted to run over his head… but politely and without damage or consequence… or really doing anything because I’d feel bad if anything happened.
My father would be the same way with the note writing. It drove me nuts. No conversations, just sticky notes on the mirrors/doors etc. A wonderful way to avoid reaction.
Sounds like the landlord needed a new profession.