Passive Aggressive Notes

I work in marketing, so we are constantly trying to reach new audiences to sell our products. That’s just the fact of the matter. We are bombarded with marketing messages in the tens of thousands each day – sometimes we don’t even realize it. I know most people hate telemarketers and some even go so far as to taunt or harass a telemarketer when they call. Heck, I’ve hung up on them mid-sentence sometimes.

But it always blows my mind when people are so incensed by something that they have to write a little note. Today we did a fax blast out to some potential customers. We got a fax back from one, with our message we had sent, but they posted a sticky note on top that said, “F-U with this bull. Please do not send again.”

I’m assuming they didn’t mean “Follow Up” and rather meant the nastier F-U.

It is interesting to me that this person, whoever they were, was so upset that a piece of paper came through their fax machine, that they took the time to fax us back. Maybe they were really low on toner or something.

A couple of weeks ago, I parallel parked, which I’m not all that great at to begin with, but was in a hurry so I didn’t check my parking job other than to see if I had made it close to the curb without  going over. I did, so I proceeded on to my destination, which was a dinner date with some friends. When I came out, there was a lovely note on my windshield. It went something like this: “Dear D-Bag: learn how to park between the lines, a-hole!” I looked, and sure enough, the front end of my RAV-4 was protruding ever-so-slightly past the line. But the spot in front of me was the “first” spot in the row and had plenty of room to park in front of me without a problem. Yeah, my bad for not noticing the lines in the first place, and not parking within them, but was it necessary to call me TWO offensive names in a note? Was my parking foul  THAT horrible that it made someone THAT angry to a) find a pen and paper; b) spout off this angry note; c) put it on my windshield? Honestly.

(See more Passive Aggressive Notes here)

I guess my point is, there are a lot of really bad things that happen to people in life that are WORTH getting upset over. These two above examples are not. Why do people spend time and energy on negativity? It really does no one any good.