passive-aggressive Definition: of or relating to a personality that harbours aggressive emotions while behaving in a calm or detached manner.
Have you ever felt angry about something a colleague, flatmate or even a total stranger has done?
Has your pent up anger ever unleashed itself as a written note?
Have you ever been the recipient of a nagging reminder to do the dishes or turn down the music, imbued with a faux friendliness and stuck on a Post-It for all to see? Welcome to the hilarious and compelling world of the passive-aggressive.
Part voyeuristic entertainment, part group therapy passiveaggressivenotes.com provides an amusing glimpse into the private lives of strangers as well as a revealing insight into our collective neuroses.
Your Mother Doesn’t Work Here collects all of the most popular notes that have been submitted to the website – some passive and almost polite in tone, many overtly aggressive – but all sharing a common sense of frustration channelled into a ‘helpful’ note.
Notes from the disgruntled and dissatisfied, Post-Its for food thieves, warnings to the irresponsible and untidy, notices from neighbours and landlords and messages from fed up flatmates who have reached the end of their tether all feature in this compendium of textual passive-aggression.
Entries include the shaming, 'Your mum does not work here (& would be embarrassed by your behaviour if she did)' to the irritable, 'We wish people who are turning off the hall lights would get a life.'
Laugh at the ridiculous, delight in the bizarre and nod your head in recognition at those notes that strike a chord - after all, there's a little bit of passive-aggressive in all of us.
