Your Mother Doesn’t Work Here: Painfully polite and hilariously hostile notes - Hardcover

Miller, Kerry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007284659 ISBN 13: 9780007284658

Publisher: Collins, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"We dare you not to laugh at loud at these funny, snarky notes."
-- Redbook magazine, November, 2008

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 flatmates) 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 apartment's 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.

--Kerry Miller

About this edition

• Publisher: Collins
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0007284659
• ISBN 13: 9780007284658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176