apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Always appreciate you keeping the NSFW stuff off the site. Thanks!

OMG the note about parking too close to the driveway is awesome..

In my neighborhood, people leave chalk notes on the sidewalk, mostly about where dogs should do their business.

Too bad dogs can't read.

I love the shower diagram! And, uh, it's probably a demonstration of their awesomeness that my roommates never left me the Earth Day note.

The last one made me smile. The bbq one made me feel weird.

The 9/11 note? Really?

Those are hilarious.

bromeliad - i had not thought about sidewalk chalk messages... i am sure the lady with the beagle that craps in my yard would just have her dog poop more though.

I'd say the only passive-aggressive message (yes, I know too much on the subject) is the wonderfully sarcastic parking fine note; the rest seem to be fairly straightforward, if unusually creative, pleas/warnings.

yeah, BBQ made me feel weird too.
Earth day comment is awesome.

susang - We included the 9-11 note, more because it caught us off guard than anything. We're assuming the note was written closer to the actual 9-11 date than not.

how are these passive aggressive?

Well, one could argue that leaving a note is in itself a passive-aggressive act. Sometimes it is better to confront a malefactor directly.

Leaving a note is definitely passive-aggressive.

Haha, love the shower illustrations

I had a neighbor once whose girlfriend was incredibly loud during sex.

One time, after a particularly loud "session" was over, I decided I'd had enough. I grabbed two pots, started banging them together and yelled "Encore!" at the top of my lungs.

I never heard them after that.

LOL these are great. reminds me of Found Magazine

It is unfortunate that people can't just do the right thing without neighbors or roommates having to leave notes for them. I suspect that by the time the notes got this "passive aggressive" there had been conversations or other nicer notes.

As for notes themselves being "passive aggressive", sometimes people aren't around when the perpetrators are doing their nasty stuff. Seems even weirder to lie in wait so you can have a chat.

OMG the note about parking too close to the driveway is awesome..

I loved it too!!!!!!!!

Umm, I pretty much love the showering one. :)

If you ever leave a note like this, you are a dick. You are potentially a bigger dick than the person who did whatever it was you felt you needed to leave a note about.

If the note is too a roommate you are saying "I'm too much of a wuss to actually speak to you about what's bothering me."

If the note is to the public, or to an "unknown" person you are saying "everyone should pay attention to my problems."

I could spend all day reading that site. I practically have before.

http://www.abreadaday.com

Max, I disagree. I don't think leaving notes is the first thing you should do to resolve a problem, but sometimes it might be necessary (like when you don't know whom to talk to). And putting a public sign up in a common space is OK in certain situations (like asking people to please not dump their junk mail on the lobby floor).

However, from experience I can tell everyone that notes usually exacerbate bad roommate and neighbor situations. If it gets to the point where you feel like you need to leave a note, then it's already past the point of resolution and you're just adding fuel to the resentment fire.

wow, this is changing my life as we speak. Certain guy who lives on the 4th floor will be getting a note next time he enters the elevator, about the virtues of not-smelling-worse-than-the-homeless-guy down the block...or maybe just using the stairs since the elevator traps funk like you wouldn't believe....

you know, i've been tempted to leave a note for the downstairs neighbors who sing and play really loud, really bad opera (i'm down with opera, but they're so tone-deaf, it's ridicuous). i knew about this site--a nice distraction, but i'm still on the fence. maybe show up on their door step holding a boombox a-la lloyd dobler to get their attention instead?

"This is not post-war Italy. Stealing bikes is not cool."

Made of win.

i'm pretty sure you just found my new favorite website. thanks, as always, AT...

In fact, they're all great... except for the barbecue one, which begs for bitch-slappery.

I have to agree most notes are passive-aggressive and unless it's for someone that you can't confront (you don't know who they are) then just talk to the person directly. Most of the time a note, regardless of the tone will pretty much be ignored or make the situation worse.

I once left a neighbor this text message: Sounds like she's getting it good up there! She stopped howling.

Some friends of ours lived in one half of a duplex - their bedroom shared wall with neighbors who were very- ahem- vocal & enthusiastic. Our friends recorded a show from Animal Planet w/ appropriate jungle noises & played it. Much quieter after that.

prudes.

I kind of agree with Max. In my experience, people who writes these notes are incredibly irritating. I once spent a whole afternoon cleaning a shared apartment. My pasta sauce rose over the top of the bowl I was using in the microwave and I didn't clean it up because it was super hot. One of my roommates then stuck a post-it on my door and the microwave asking me to clean it. I didn't out of spite. She never cleaned a damn thing and left her crap everywhere.

Also, the driveway one would be more funny had someone not parked over 2 feet of my driveway yesterday as I was getting in my car to leave. I could barely get out and had to go the opposite way to the way I wanted and the person who parked just sat there looking at me struggle. $85 seems a bit steep, but maybe it wasn't a one-off thing that they parked badly.

Max is right.

still don't think these are passive aggressive just because they're notes. the content is pretty direct in all of them. the term PA is way overused.

I'm laughing right now because this reminds me of early matrimony; one time after an unresolved disagreement, I spelled a not nice name out of cut ham and placed it across his mashed potatoes. By the time he had opened his lunch and called to apologize, we had both forgotten we were fighting.

Ha -- funny. But seriously, just because it's a note, doesn't mean it's "passive" -- some of these are just plain old healthy "shape the F up" messages with more aggression and/or humor than passivity by far. Let's not pathologize them, eh?

love them. All well deserved. I have been known to leave lovingly-penned "Next time you park in front of me, leave a can opener" notes on ahole city cars.

I think most of them are pretty direct and I don't think that leaving a note is by definition passive-aggressive. I agree that the term is way overused and also that a lot of people don't understand what it means.

If the note-writer pretends to be all sweetness and light when he's around the guilty (?) party on other occasions and only lets his anger out in the note, then yeah, that's passive-aggressiveness. But there's no evidence of that here since all we have are the notes and not the whole stories.

wow.. these are great! my crazy neighbor doesn't like people parking in front of his house in "his" parking space, so he leaves notes all the time on people's cars and i usually snag them for my own amusement. one car continued to park in front of his house and he keyed the passenger side of it all to hell and keyed "bad parking" on one of the doors. what an a-hole.