Passive Aggressive Notes: Painfully Polite and Hilariously Hostile Writings

This curated collection combines dozens of outrageous, never-before-seen notes as well as favorites from Passiveaggressivenotes.com a 2008 Webby Award Winner and the official "Best Blog" of the South by Southwest Interactive festival.

A Note from the Author

It all began with a first date...and not a particularly good date, either. Apparently, things between this guy and his roommate had gotten so bad that they now communicated almost exclusively via Post-it note. Ah, yes, I said, I know those notes well--my current apartment (where I lived with three other roommates) had seen its share, most of them about the presence of unwashed dishes in the sink. They were usually signed with love; they were never addressed directly. I should start collecting them, I joked--put them on the Internet or something. Now that would be passive-aggressive.

Later that night--after it became clear that our relationship wasn't going to progress beyond standard small talk--I decided to do just that. And unlike my roommates' approach to dish-washing, the response to passiveaggressivenotes.com was enthusiastic, immediate, and overwhelming. Within weeks of the site's launch, thousands of notes poured in from shared bathrooms, kitchens, cubicles, and parking lots. (Wrote one reader: "Instead of a single note, can I submit an entire person? Like my mother?") This book represents the funniest and most outrageous of those submissions.

Despite the book's title, some of these notes are really more aggressive in tone, and some of them are more passive--polite, even. What they all share a common sense of frustration that's been channeled into written form rather than a direct confrontation. It's barbed criticism disguised as something else--helpful advice, friendly concern, light-hearted humor. But as Dr. Scott Wetzler, a clinical psychologist and author of Living with the Passive-Aggressive Man, observed: "A joke can be the most skillful passive-aggressive act there is."

--Kerry Miller

A Look Inside Passive Aggressive Notes
(Click on Images to Enlarge)

Dear Stalker Get a Life You Fail Conscious Sense of Things