The NY Times ran an article, and later a follow-up with reader comments/suggestions, about how people put up with life's annoyances. I want to be just like them when I grow up. Wait, I already am.
Bolded sections below represent things I've done.
No Need to Stew: A Few Tips to Cope With Life's Annoyances
By IAN URBINA
Published: March 15, 2005
When Seth Shepsle goes to Starbucks, he orders a "medium" because "grande" - as the coffee company calls the size, the one between big and small - annoys him.
Meg Daniel presses zero whenever she hears a computerized operator on the telephone so that she can talk to a real person "Just because they want a computer to handle me doesn't mean I have to play along," she.. said.
When subscription cards fall from magazines Andrew Kirk is reading, he stacks them in a pile at the comer of his desk. At the end of each month, he puts them in the mail but leaves them blank so that the advertiser is forced to pay the business reply postage without gaining a new subscriber.
Life can involve big hardships, like being fired or smashing up your car. There is only so much you can do about them. But far more prevalent - and perhaps in the long run just as insidious - are life's many little annoyances.
These, you can do something about.
To examine the little weapons people use for everyday survival is to be given a free guidebook on getting by, created by the millions who feel that they must. It is a case study in human inventiveness, with occasional juvenile and petty passages, and the originators of these tips are happy to share them.
"They're an integral part of how people cope," said Prof. James C. Scott, who teaches anthropology and political science at Yale University, and the author of "Weapons of the Weak," about the feigned ignorance, foot-dragging and other techniques Malaysian peasants used to avoid cooperating with the arrival of new technology in the 1970's. "All societies have them, but
they're successful only to the extent that they avoid open confrontation."
The slow driver in fast traffic, the shopper with 50 coupons at the front of the checkout line and the telemarketer calling at dinner all inflict life's thousand little lashes. But some see these infractions as precious opportunities, rare chances for retribution in the face of forces beyond our control.
Wesley A. Williams spent more than a year exacting his revenge against junk mailers. When signing up for a no-junk-mail list failed to stem the flow, he resorted to writing at the top of each unwanted item: "Not at this address. Return to sender." But the mail kept coming because the envelopes had "or current resident" on them, obligating mail carriers to deliver it, he
said.
Next, he began stuffing the mail back into the "business reply" envelope and sending it back so that the mailer would have to pay the postage. "That wasn't exacting a heavy enough cost from them for bothering me," said Mr. Williams, 35, a middle school science teacher who lives in Melrose, N.Y., near Albany.
After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper, and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages.
"You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh," said Mr. Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail. A spokesman for the United States Postal Service, Gerald McKieman, said that Mr. Williams's actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.
Sometimes, small acts of rebellion offer big doses of relief.
"I've come to realize that I'm almost addicted to the sick little pleasure I get from lashing out at these things," said Mr. Kirk, 24, a freelance writer from Brooklyn who collects and returns magazine inserts.
When ordering a pizza from Domino's, Mr. Kirk says he always requests a "small, " knowing that he will be corrected and told that medium is the smallest available size. "It makes me feel better to point out that their word games aren't fooling anyone," he said.
The Internet offers a booming trade to help with this type of annoyance-fighting behavior. For example, shared passwords to free Web sites are available at www.bugmenot.com to help people avoid dealing with long registration forms. To coexist with loud cellphone talkers, the Web offers hand-held jammers that, although illegal in the United States, can block all signals within a 45 foot radius.
Mitch Altman, a 48-year old inventor living in San Francisco, said that in the last three months he has sold about 30,000 of his key-chain-size zappers called TV-B-Gone, which can be used discreetly to switch off televisions in public places. "When you go to a restaurant to talk with friends, why should you have to deal with the distraction of a ceiling-mounted television?" Mr. Altman said.
Some Web sites specialize in arming people against online annoyances. The site www.slashdot.org posted the name and the mailing address of one of the worst known spammers, encouraging people to sign the spammer up for catalogs and other junk mail to be sent to the spammer's home. Mr. McKieman of the Postal Service said that this tactic also appeared to be legal, but might constitute harassment.
Some groups are more frustrated than others. In 2002, Harris Interactive, a market research group based in Rochester, conducted a phone survey called the Daily Hassle Scale that asked 1,010 people to rank the aggravations they faced in a typical day. The survey found that poor people and African-Americans suffer the most stress from the everyday annoyances such as noisy neighbors, telemarketers and pressure at work, but it did not explain why.
Sometimes, the resistance to these frustrations is organized.
Work slowdowns are methods commonly used by labor unions to apply pressure without actually striking. During the Solidarity movement in Poland, people expressed their disapproval of the government-run news media by taking a walk with their hats on backward at exactly 6 p.m. when the state news program started. When the government noticed the trend, it issued curfews, but people then put their televisions in their windows facing outward so that only the police walking the streets would see the broadcasts.
"You have to remember, in Poland during those years showing up drunk at work was seen as a patriotic act because people hated the bosses so much," Professor Scott said.
But even on less coordinated levels, shared frustration is often the augur of countercultural trends. Mr. Shepsle said he took great solace in discovering his irritations with Starbucks' lingo summed up on a popular T-shirt in Chicago. The shirt, which mocks the pretentiousness of a certain Chicago neighborhood, features two names. Next to Lincoln Park it says "Tall, Grande, Venti." Next to Wicker Park it says "Small, Medium, Large."
"It's nice to know I'm not alone," said Mr. Shepsle, 28, who works for a theater company in Manhattan.
Most people participate in this sort of behavior on some level, Professor Scott said, adding that his own habit was to write "England" rather than "United Kingdom" on letters he sends to his British friends. He described this as his way of disregarding British claims to Wales and Scotland.
"As a tactic, it doesn't amount to much except a way to provide a tiny and private sense of satisfaction," he said. "But that's something."
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Revenge of the Perturbed II: Readers Offer Tactics
By IAN URBINA
Published: March 20, 2005
As it turns out, frustration - not necessity - may be the true mother of invention.
An article that appeared in The New York Times last week about the things people do to deal with life's many little annoyances spurred a flood of responses from readers offering their own tactics.
While providing a telling look at the banal things that bother people, these reactions also shed light on the lengths people go to extract retribution for mundane infractions. But most of all, they revealed the creativity in passive aggression.
Dena Roslan was sick of a co-worker who kept helping himself to her lunch cookies. So Ms. Roslan, 30, a clothing designer who works in Manhattan, bought a bag of dog biscuits that looked like biscotti. "My only remorse was not being able to see his face after he ate the bait," she said.
Stewart Dean said he despised the scripted questions people ask at the end of service phone calls.
"It's especially galling when they ask, 'Is there anything else we can do to make you completely satisfied?' and they haven't even solved the problem you called about," said Mr. Dean, 57, a computer administrator for Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. So he said he routinely makes requests that the person on the phone cannot possibly fulfill. "I usually respond: 'Sure. Would you please get Bush out of the White House?'"
To be annoyed is to be human, and while many people cope with small frustrations by ignoring them, odd things do get to people.
"It just doesn't make any sense," said Janine Papp, 30, a grant writer who works for a nonprofit group in Manhattan. She is annoyed that the smallest popcorn size at her nearby theater is called "child-size."
"I'm an adult, so why should I have to ask for a child's item?" Ms. Papp said. "If I order a 'small,' I'll be getting a medium-size bag, so I just ask for the 'smallest possible bag' of popcorn."
Every time he eats at a fast-food restaurant, Mitchell Jacobs is reminded of how much he dislikes the expectation that he will bus his own table. "Doesn't McDonald's make enough money? Come on, Ronald, hire some people to clean the tables," said Mr. Jacobs, 70, a retired businessman from Manhattan, adding that he now just leaves his trash at the table.
For many, the simple goal is to give adversaries a taste their own medicine.
Tony Manzo takes his stand at the local video store. "I always say, 'Hello, how are you today, sir?' in the most monotone voice I can muster," said Mr. Manzo, 29, a writer from San Francisco. "The point is to pre-empt the bored and slovenly teenager behind the counter before he mumbles the words to me. It's a way to show him just how annoying his soggy monotone refrain is for us to hear on the other side of the counter."
When subscription cards fall out of Chris Marzuk's magazines, he fills them in with the addresses of the senders. "That way Time magazine can pay the return postage and also get plenty of subscriptions to Time magazine," wrote Mr. Marzuk, 54, a school administrator from Greenlawn, N.Y.
Telemarketers may provoke the angriest reactions. Some people put them on hold and never return to the phone. Others say they put their toddlers on the phone, encouraging them to babble until the caller succumbs. But the most common tactic is avoidance.
Although Carol Lydon, 38, of Philadelphia has a day job as a paralegal, she tells telemarketers who call at night that she is running out to work. "I'm also never over 18 when they ask to speak with someone over the age of 18, and I'm always the housekeeper if they ask if I'm authorized to make decisions regarding phone service, cable television service," she added.
Others take their small acts of rebellion a step further.
Dawn Quiett said she had changed her voting habits in reaction to unsolicited calls from campaigners. Ms. Quiett, a 35-year-old publicist from Dallas, said that during the last presidential race she received so many calls from pollsters and party officials that she began telling them she would not vote for any candidate who used telemarketers.
Of course, some people go overboard.
Having worked in the past for several small direct-mail marketers, Donna Rothkopf of Astoria, Queens, said that envelopes often came back with everything from used condoms to giant cockroaches in them.
"The truly hostile respondent used more sinister weapons of retribution, like the top of an aluminum can, a razor blade, or a handful of broken glass," she said. "These are Pyrrhic victories that fail to influence the way of doing business, but succeed in bringing harm to an innocent cog."
