Passive Battlefields
My wife found this sparkling agate yesterday: Passive Aggressive Notes. It’s a showcase of just how well people can communicate their unbridled loathing when they don’t have to look you in the eye.
This is funny because we’ve been having a problem with our upstairs neighbor for the last six months. The man likes his music, and likes it loud. Loud enough to wake the dead; loud enough to cause seismic trauma to my couch. He particularly fancies himself a drum prodigy in “Rock Band,” and will proclaim his prowess at midnight or later when my wife has to be up at 6am the next day. And therein lies the crux of the conflict.
I am laid back enough to appreciate other people’s definition of excessive volume, but I live with a charming and demure young lady who will tear open your chest and feast on your soul if you push her too far. Fortunately, there is a buffer zone between “nice schoolteacher Becky” and “soul reaver Becky,” and that zone is called “passive aggressive Becky.” I’ve become very familiar with her when dishes need doing. Normally, she would be expressing her distaste with our neighbor through a series of harshly-worded notes, but now she has me.
Over the years, I’ve become the type of person who doesn’t balk at confrontation, so I had no problem beating down the man’s door and letting him know what his problem was.
Lord knows I certainly didn’t expect him to be naked.
Well, almost naked. He was wearing boxers and a bluetooth headset. His response to the first time, as it was for the following six encounters, was that he didn’t realize he was being loud. I believe this is because he doesn’t know just how thin his floor, my ceiling, is. Perhaps if I had told him how I know when he and his girlfriend have sex, or how I know they both take breaks in the middle of it to run to the bathroom. Twice.
But this is something I didn’t have a chance to say before his door shuts. So I took my complaints to the apartment management. Four times.
Nothing.
Becky began screaming at the ceiling when she heard the thumping bassline start, and the man upstairs was dangerously unaware of the nighness of his end. He didn’t realize that I was his only hope, but the legal methods of getting that point across were exhausted. So I did what I had hoped I wouldn’t need to. I wrote a passive-aggressive note. Not to him, but to the apartment management.
That was yesterday, and I haven’t heard a peep since.
Passive-aggressive notes to save the day.