Passive Aggressive Notes

[Sebastian Dangerfield]

The joys of communal living extend as far as finding a note on your toilet, rather like this one:



I have always been baffled by the sheer inability that people have to drag themselves to your door, knock politely and sort out any problems in a manly and polite fashion, maybe with a dual to the death, or a verbal fist fist.  ("Thwock!" "Ping!" "Smack!")

In my years of communal living, I have been refered to as "the flatmate" in scrawly little notes pinned to the fridge.  Amongst the crimes I have been accused of are:

• Leaving toilet roll in the bathroom.  A roll.  Not a stringy little piece covered in shit
• Eating frozen bread
• Having loud sex (sadly, I was not even in at the time.)

And in my working life, I have been privy to many e-mails accusing various people of clogging up the toilets or stealing items of food.

There is a website for such notes here: http://passiveaggressivenotes.wordpress.com but I would like to hear, or even better, see, your examples of those passive aggressive notes from work colleagues, flatmates and weird strangers.

[hoverdonkey]

"That shit is disrespectful"?

Is he a gangster? To actually write that takes some doing.

[Artemis]

Why doesn't he check the seat before he sits on it?! If I was living in a communal house, it'd be the first thing I'd do. The image of him realising he's sitting in your piss is the greatest payback you can have, surely.

I live on my own now, but as from next month am back on my travels and back into shared accommodation, some of it in hostels <shudder>. I don't know how I'll cope. During my sharing years I've been victim to several little notes, not specifically aimed at me, but I've ignored them all. Like you say, if someone can't grow a pair of balls and come and address it like an adult, the problem is theirs.

[Utter Shit]

Well hang on a minute, did you leave piss on the seat? If you did, then he/she's not the one in the wrong - you are. However cuntily you think he/she has gone about telling you, you're still the one in the wrong. Your crime is worse.

[sick as a pike]

I disagree.  "Kregg" is such a monumentally abysmal name that it would automatically render its bearer incapable of being correct.

[Sebastian Dangerfield]

Well hang on a minute, did you leave piss on the seat? If you did, then he/she's not the one in the wrong - you are. However cuntily you think he/she has gone about telling you, you're still the one in the wrong. Your crime is worse.

This is not my note, alas, it was taken from the site.  I have long since abandoned communal living. The notes were partly to blame.  I feel things would have ended in death of all parties involved.  Except myself, because I am immortal.

[Oscar]

I used to live in a house filled with pointless note battles, tragically none of them were clever or bizarre enough to be funny, depending on the person, they were either abusive "I nearly fucking broke my neck because somebody didn't clean the floor" (The fridge leaks, you dimwit, if you're the one in the kitchen, YOU clean the floor) or demanding "When you finish the toilet roll, put another one the holder" (but why not just put the roll on before you use it? What difference does it make?) or patronising "I think we'll all be happier if the lounge is kept clean and tidy" (We'd all be happier if you hadn't painted the lounge fucking blue and red and stuck hippy posters on the walls.)

When the notes stopped working, one of my flatmates (because three of the fuckers were note writers) decided to set her alarm at six in the morning, stick on her music at top volume and then walk around the house slamming every door five or six times. I simply assumed that she was being crazy, but it turned out that the message she was trying to give me and one other guy was "Please could you shut the doors a little quieter in the afternoons. I know that you shut them quietly in the morning and at night, but I find the slight bang when you don't carefully turn the handle distressing, yes, even when I'm watching the TV at full blast or shouting on my mobile phone for hours on end."

Anyway, three of us escaped and moved into a lovely house together, with one other sane person. These days the only notes that get written are things like "THIS ISN'T A NOTE, but if anyone remembers can they record QI tonight. Thank you very much. Have a lovely day everyone." And if there are problems then we talk to each other or just fucking get over it. Aaand breeaaathe.

[Blumf]

In my years of communal living, I have been refered to as "the flatmate" in scrawly little notes pinned to the fridge.  Amongst the crimes I have been accused of are:

• ...
• Having loud sex (sadly, I was not even in at the time.)

• ...

[purlieu]

I opened the fridge one day to find a sheet of paper saying "keep your hands off my yoghurts".  Made me laugh.

[Sebastian Dangerfield]

The most amusing fridge note I ever found was a drawing not unlike this photograph taped to some juice.

[Neil]

[Eight Taiwanese Teenagers]

I just got an angry look from my boss for laughing so much at that!

[Huzzie]

Why doesn't he check the seat before he sits on it?!

Surely he shouldn't have to.

Mike, you're a dirty dog!

[23 Daves]

It's a personality thing, I find - quiet, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly, hippy-ish housemates always eventually turn out to be the worst for leaving notes, whereas outgoing types will scream their heads off at the slightest inconvenience, and people with "issues" will exact ridiculous revenge scenarios such as the "6am slamming door" one that was outlined in a reply above.

I can actually see the point of them if you're living with people who aren't close friends, believe it or not.  If you have a go at someone about something, it's often taken the wrong way or just plain ignored (or both) or they'll remind you about your petty misdeed from last week, whereas a note can be phrased as a gentle reminder, and doesn't actually specifically target anyone.  That's the central issue, I find, as half the time you really don't know who is responsible, and by the time you've individually spoken to every single person in the house who might possibly be to blame (only to hear the usual denials) you might as well have written a new novel or something.  Trust me, I had a whole fucking decade of housesharing... "words" achieve nothing apart from the phrase "Why are you blaming me?" and resentment.

The main bugbear with almost everyone I've ever lived with was "the state of the bathroom/ kitchen".  Although I once got a brilliant note stating that I'd forgotten to pull the shower curtain over properly whilst taking a shower and had "flooded their bedroom downstairs", which I've a sneaking suspicion might have been a wild exaggeration.  The person responsible for that missive would always beam at me and say "No worries!" when I apologised after she'd shoved one of her notes under my door, which really infuriated me.  I'd honesty rather she'd have said "Yeah, you really pissed me off with that, but I'm sure you got that impression anyway from the irate tone of my scribble.  Don't do it again, eh!"  It's a bit more honest, and I wouldn't have minded.

I used to have a housemate who was terminally unemployed, and would stagger indoors at 3am drunk making a huge row in the middle of the week.  I was so sick of trying to have words with him about it only to be ignored that I thought I'd set a trap in the middle of the hallway.  I built a makeshift "web" out of double-sided sticky tape and placed the note right in the middle, so in the dark it would have attracted his attention by hovering in front of his eyes, reminding him to be a bit more silent on his way back to his bedroom, as well as perhaps stealth-like and wary of other schoolboy-type traps.  Of course, he staggered straight into the makeshift web and spluttered and swore, waking the whole house up, so it was probably the least practical housemate note ever left by anyone ever.

I called him a c__t in the morning, for what it's worth....

[ccbaxter]

I recently felt compelled to leave a note on the windscreen of a car that kept parking in my allocated space outside my home (there are only a few to go around, with nowhere else to park for quite a way away... but anyway), but opted for the polite - well, sarkily over-polite, perhaps -approach: "Sorry to be a bore, but the actual owner of this parking space would be incredibly grateful in future to be able to use it, if this isn't too much trouble for you to bear in mind - thanks ever so..."
Thankfully they seem since then neither to have returned, nor punctured my tyres (- though realising the space seems to sit directly below a tree-branch where an apparently-ill bird nests, I've stopped parking there myself now.)

Someone at work sent an email to all with the following message:

"Dear food/drink thief/thieves:
Several are the occasions when I've left food and/or drink in the refrigerator overnight (CLEARLY labeled with my name in BIG BLACK MARKER) only to find it mysteriously missing the next morning.
One such occasion was last night, when I left a pint of Skimmed Milk in the refrigerator that was clearly labelled with my name.
Lucky for me, I anticipated it would (once again) be nicked...
...So I spat in it.
Hope you enjoyed it."

[Milo]

An ex-housemate once put this up on the fridge:



There was another one too on a different occasion but I can't find the file... The rest of us were quite certain he had eaten his own eggs.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Was this your ex-housemate?

[aaaaaaaaaargh!]

Someone at work sent an email to all with the following message:

"Dear food/drink thief/thieves:
Several are the occasions when I've left food and/or drink in the refrigerator overnight (CLEARLY labeled with my name in BIG BLACK MARKER) only to find it mysteriously missing the next morning.
One such occasion was last night, when I left a pint of Skimmed Milk in the refrigerator that was clearly labelled with my name.
Lucky for me, I anticipated it would (once again) be nicked...
...So I spat in it.
Hope you enjoyed it."

That's magnificent.

I'm living on my own from next month.  Was thinking about getting a lodger, but nah, it's not worth it.

[Neil]

[Artemis]

Edited.

[Tokyo Sexwhale]

An ex-housemate once put this up on the fridge:



There was another one too on a different occasion but I can't find the file... The rest of us were quite certain he had eaten his own eggs.

I have those Beatles fridge magnets.

Carry on.

[Small Man Big Horse]

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

[squinky]

Living in student halls with a cluster full of boys has meant that I've found myself resorting to the Passive-Aggressive Note at least once in my time. After my third narrow brush with a wee-covered toilet seat, I stuck a post-it note at eye level on the wall behind saying something along the nauseatingly passive lines of, "if whoever keeps pissing on the seat would please stop it, that would be really good, thanks".

Yeah, I know.

Anyway, next time I went into that toilet, the post-it note had made its way down to the seat itself. Also, although I didn't investigate too hard, I'm pretty much convinced that it wasn't just the sticky back of the note that was keeping it attached.

It was still surprisingly legible, though. Just goes to show that if you can aim well enough to deface a note while leaving the message intact, then surely you can bloody well aim for the little hole in the seat!

[23 Daves]

There's no excuse at all for pissing on toilet seats that I can think of.  Absolutely none.  Lifting up the whole toilet seat so you can aim properly at the porcelain is a very basic life skill.  How subhuman would you have to be to cause other tired, weary people to sit in a pool of your piss every morning?  And what's the issue with wiping up your own mess if "accidents" occur?  It's one of those things for which "I didn't know I was doing it" really can't be a feasible excuse.

On the subject of missing food, funnily enough I was reading an interview with Andy Partridge out of XTC the other day, and he said that he used to leave "notes" on his food in the fridge when he had to share a house with the band.  His favourite rant used to be "Where are my Coco Pops?  Just because you lot can't get your shit together enough to go out and do any shopping of your own".  Apparently it nearly split the band up...

Oh, I'm so fucking glad I don't have to houseshare these days.  Mind you, Mrs Daves had a friend round for dinner on Monday night, and I notice the plates have all been left piled up to wash and are starting to stink, and she's going out tonight, so I wonder who's going to be sorting that little lot out, eh?

[lactating man nips]

I have been sharing houses with people the past five years (well the first year was halls) and every time there has been one complete cunt, usually more than one actually.

Funnily enough a day after reading the mouse turd thread and thinking to myself its a miracle I haven't encountered one I have discovered a mouse is in our kitchen. One housemate seemingly appears to be as happy living amongst refuse as a pig is living in shit, and thanks to him the kitchen is not particularly clean, so I blame him. My other housemate is almost more irritating with his passive aggressiveness which is always directed at me despite the fact I am not the problem. Inevitably it will be muggins that has to sort the problem out as usual as the others are too bone fucking idle to do anything about it.

Back on topic, I hate leaving notes though I have done it occasionally in the past. I just suffer in silence generally now as when I do say something it either gets ignored or goes in one ear and out the other, or the person in question gets really defensive despite the fact they know they are completely in the wrong.

Another past housemate owes me almost a grand.

I really cannot wait to live on my own as an antisocial hermit.

[Milo]

I'm enjoying the mongs.

I remember once my own passive-agressiveness didn't make it into note form, instead I salted various of my drinks in the fridge. I remember being delighted at hearing someone spitting out milk and going "UGH!" one night.

[Murdo]

This thread has reminded me of this amusing book.

Tales of debauchery, drugs, flatmates from hell and nasty things lurking in the kitchen sink abound in Rolling Stone journalist John Birmingham's account of sharing houses. From dead rats in the kitchen to tent-dwelling lodgers in the living room, you'll run for the safety of living alone.

[Santa's Boyfriend]

I've lived in a multitude of nightmare houseshares, and am living on my own at the moment as a result.  I much prefer living communally, but it's such a fucking gamble.  I've only recieved a note once though - a psycho chav woman I was living with thought some coat-hangers were missing from her wardrobe, assumed I took them and went and nicked all mine, leaving me a note in my own wardrobe calling me a cunt.  Needless to say I was fucking furious, and would probably fly off the handle at any note being left for me now.  It's amazing how petty this stuff can be, really.

[actwithoutwords]

This is as good a place as any to put this. One of my flatmates nicked half a McVities Jamaican Ginger Cake from the fridge at the weekend. Fucking ridiculous. It's college accommodation so we don't know each other particularly well. Who steals half a cake as well? I'll fully admit shaving bits off people's cheese from time to time, and don't mind the fact that my milk is being taken on a semi-regular basis, but the entire rest of my fucking cake? I'm now going to piss on the toilet seat, innocent flatmates may get hurt, but I've been backed into a corner.