Anon
I’M TALKING TO YOU
(The seamless rise of the nameless note)
(c) David Astle
This Parking Space 4 Rezdents Only. Yes you!
Hey Pigman, microwaves need cleaning
Some normal people sleep at nite. Close door QUIETLY!!!
Office kitchens, share-houses, windscreens, letterboxes: the anonymous note is bound to bob up anywhere. Tantrums, threats, gentle reminders – the genre embraces all tones, not to mention maverick spelling and a fetish for exclamation marks and triple-underlines. But why do we leave such messages? Why not speak to the target audience in person, or at least leave a name behind?
“It’s a lot easier to write cruel things in a note than it is to say them to someone’s face,” says Kerry Miller, a New York business writer with a fetish for the artform. Her book, Your Mother Doesn’t Work Here: Painfully Polite and Hilariously Hostile Writings is due out this spring.
“It’s pretty amazing what people can rationalise in the heat of the moment,” she adds. Miller’s website, Passive Aggressive Notes, is a treasury of Post-It trash-talk, ranging form the cute (Use me, rinse me, thank you, Sponge), the desperate (I know a monster who eats kids like you!!!) and the mock-philanthropic (Please think of others, ie me.)
This last one echoes a note flapping on Alison’s car in Bronte. Its unknown writer alleged to speak for the street: Dear Newer Resident – just wondering if you could park your car maybe on Silva St or Carlisle St – so very close – as parking in our precious st is so very limited”¦
“I’m imagining a Mrs Mangel from Neighbours character,” says Melbourne psychologist, Dr Jonathon Tandos, “who has nothing better to do – staring out her window all day, looking for anything that might offend them. That way they can complain to give themselves a sense of participation and meaning.”
No doubt Mrs Mangel would have lost her falsies in Sydney’s inner west last year, overhearing the jungle sex in an adjoining flat. Aflame with new love, a young 30s couple (opting for their own anonymity) let their passions reign.
“The next morning,” recalls the woman involved, the flat’s leaseholder, “I found a note under my door. I was absolutely mortified. I thought, Who would write such a horrible note?”
YOUR OLD SPRING BED VERY NOISY, began the tirade, sprinkled with the monikers of ‘DEAR’ and ‘YR NEIGHB’. “The note had all this misplaced affection and text-speak.” Versus the red-ink anger of its upper-case letters, plus the snide digs at her fella’s midriff: SEEM YOUR BOYFRIEND HAVE TO LOST WEIGHT.
Only now, a year later, can the note-recipient laugh. “I mean, what was wrong with writing, Hey I’m the person from next-door, and the walls are a bit thin”¦?”
But such conciliation never happened. Instead the notes continued, despite the lovers dragging the mattress onto the floor. Worse, the fourth and final note appeared on the communal notice board, the very day the pair were shifting house. If you sleep often get Disturb especially like last night between 1-3am caused by sex marathon”¦
“The notes were a final straw to move,” admits the ex-tenant. “But when saw the fourth one, I felt like I was being hunted down. I had no way to respond. I went grey. I took down the note, sat in the ute and didn’t speak for an hour. I felt so small.”
In psychology terms, communication falls into four baskets: passive, assertive, aggressive and the rising market leader, passive-aggressive. “Classically your mother-in-law,” adds Tandos, “who’s liable to say, ‘Oooh, you might regret that later.’”
With a knee-jerk sense of wrong, passive-aggression is the prime suspect behind most unsigned snipes. Be more of a people’s person, OK? The mindset craves a heightened sense of order – Bums should live on street – yet is equally prepared to introduce chaos if those egoistic wishes aren’t fulfilled. I licked every can so steal away!!
Eager to avoid responsibility and confrontation, the Pass-Ag type is just as content to blame and obstruct others. Perhaps even scrawl a phantom note.
“Passive-aggressive is an indirect style,” explains Tandos. “Often sarcastic, with an inability to state your direct position. [The Pass-Ag note] is a manipulative thing, trying to corner the other person into an emotional response.”
If you choose to be around here, as one wiper-note read in a small Richmond lane, grow up, develop some manners and appreciate others. Another in a Ryde workplace states: You think copy machines fill themselves with paper?
Anonymity evades open dialogue, which suits the purpose of most covert scribes. In the same vein, the secrecy maintains a power differential – what is known as informational power. You know who you are. We all notice you are not using your car on a regular basis”¦ in other words, the licence to judge without being answerable.
Rhetorical questions are the other staples, a passive-aggressive hallmark. Do you think I’m stupid? How can anyone sleep when a dog is barking? Is this a great place to leave your bike? Would Jesus steal an apple?
Another marker has been tagged the ‘bonhomie bookend’. An example on the table reads: Please. DO NOT PARK IN FRONT OF GARAGE DOORS. Thank you.
Kerry Miller plays analyst. “I think the dissonance (between what is being said and what you imagine the writer is feeling) is exactly what makes these notes so interesting to read. You’re puzzling out the story through an unreliable narrator.”
Tandos dubs the technique a positive/negative/positive sandwich. “As if somehow your message won’t be as offensive, and you may get your point across.”
Going to greater extremes was a printed note from Sydney’s east, loud and bold in 18-point type. The chief gripe was car spaces. Despite the toxic rant – You are either an arrogant pr*** or a complete f*** wit – the sign-off was ‘Have a nice day’, complete with smiley. Likewise, a car-space feud in Brunswick Melbourne – Hey Subaru guy, you own this f***ing street or wot??? - the note’s margins were littered with sugary Clip-Art images of a jolly Mr Sun and flowers.
Of course, note-writing has its advantages. Committing our harsher responses to text can have a distancing effect, just as SMS and emails allow us all some breathing space. Our body’s thermostat can cool as we seek to articulate our emotions, rather than run the risk of real-time confrontation. If provoked, we may strike back, and we don’t know what we’re liable to say.
Yet the less we connect as people, isolated by work or fear, the more prone we appear to leaving messages in our wake. Just as text-bites double for old-school conversation, so can notes reflect a poverty of open communication. “If we were a little closer as a community,” agrees Tandos, “if we said ‘do you mind’, or ‘did you realise’, we probably wouldn’t need to resort to note-writing.”
So what about Miller, has she ever succumbed to writing the furtive note? “If my website has taught me anything, it’s that writing passive-aggressive notes is a bad idea! That said, I still live with three roommates, which is never completely without conflict”¦”
Bil’in, a Palestinian village, captures this best. The town adjoins the Israeli West Bank barrier. While touring the streets last year, a neutral observer entered a ground-floor flat leased to peace activists. There above a cluttered draining board was a bright yellow note: THIS IS A PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE SIGN: DISHES!
[Sunday Life, September 2008]