DAMAGED Reading: PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE NOTES: PAINFULLY POLITE AND HILARIOUSLY HOSTLE WRITINGS!!!

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE NOTES: PAINFULLY POLITE AND HILARIOUSLY HOSTLE WRITINGS
By Kerry Miller
Collins
Review by Louis Fowler

It doesn't matter if you're the CEO of the biggest multi-billion dollar corporation or the lowliest stock-boy at a ghetto Big Lots—chances are that sometime in your working life, someone is going to steal your lunch out of the communal refrigerator.

Doesn't that just piss you off? You bring some leftover Kung Pao chicken from last night's take-out and you've been thinking about it all morning—it's the only thing that's keeping you going, really—and you go to the fridge and it's gone, and, as if to rub that salt in the wound, they left the empty container to taunt you. And you ask me how I could just kill a man.

Thanks to our Christian society, murder just isn't an option. So, having no other recourse, you leave a threatening note taped to the icebox door, saying “Thanks guys for stealing my lunch! I hope you’re happy that I starved today! Steal my lunch again and DIE!!!”

And what about your roommates? Sure, when you guys first get together, you honestly believe that you all are going to be best friends forever. You cook together, watch TV together and stay up late, talking about your hopes and dreams. But then one of you has to go off and get a significant other and all that time together fades away, causing the lonely roommate to become a bitter shrew who finds malice in every move you make. Pretty soon you're getting Post-Its taped to your door, the majority of them reading “I don't know if you know this because you're never home anyway, but you haven't done the dishes in two weeks. It's your turn—please do them or DIE!!!”

Besides jazz, the only other really original American art-form has got to be the passive aggressive note. It's become such an everyday occurrence to see one, that we, as a society, have gotten use to them. The humor is gone. Instead, we just bitch about it to our work-mates or maybe write an even more passive aggressive note underneath it when no one is looking. We have been beaten down by these notes. We have been emptily threatened with death too many times to take it seriously.

Consider Kerry Miler's PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE NOTES: PAINFULLY POLITE AND HILARIOUSLY HOSTLE WRITINGS a real “stop and smell the roses” read. Based on her successful blog, Miller, like an alternate-universe POST SECRET, collects the passive aggressive notes that have been sent to her and, reading them in a setting like this, totally refreshes the comedy of these types of notes, recapturing the beauty of them. You'll see the break-room in a whole different way. Instead of ignoring those notes on the fridge, you're going to want to read them like a great novel, lingering on every (misspelled) word, enjoying every life-endangering threat and comparing who's written the best one. You might even steal someone's yogurt just to get one.

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