{"id":890,"date":"2005-03-19T21:30:43","date_gmt":"2005-03-20T01:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/19\/positive-passive-aggression\/"},"modified":"2008-05-24T18:30:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-24T23:30:00","slug":"positive-passive-aggression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/19\/positive-passive-aggression\/","title":{"rendered":"Positive passive-aggression?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’ve certainly engaged in my share of passive-aggressive (or just plain aggressive-aggressive) behavior when it comes to things like annoying telemarketers or incompetent customer service representatives, but the New York Times seems to have upped the ante with this article<\/a> about how people deal (or in some cases, don’t deal) with the annoyances. They got so many responses that they did a follow up article<\/a>. And Brian Lehrer<\/a> did a call-in segment on Friday (click here<\/a> for the audio link) about it.<\/p>\n

All this, of course, makes me want to relate my favorite personal anecdote, which is a few years old (and probably won’t translate quite so well in writing, but oh well).<\/p>\n

Back in my second year of law school, I had a phone number that I discovered, after receiving numerous wrong calls, was one digit off from the phone number of the Philadelphia Parking Authority. And it was a tough one – both numbers consisted only<\/em> of 2s and 7s. My number was something like 277-7727, and the parking authority was 277-7227. You can see how people can misdial that one pretty easily. So most of the time, I was actually pretty helpful – I’d give people the right number and they’d apologize profusely, and all was well, until one morning…<\/p>\n

The morning of Yom Kippur, when I was attempting to fast. Part of my fasting technique involves sleeping fairly late (if I go to services, it’s usually for Kol Nidre, at sundown the night before), so that I have less hours during the day that I have to focus on not eating or drinking anything. Except my phone rings at 6:30 in the morning. As I groggily answer the phone with the sleepiest, most pissed off yawning hello you could ever imagine, the voice on the other end of the phone just launches into "can I park on the street for free today?<\/em>"<\/p>\n

My response? "Yes. of course you can." And she hung up the phone. I really hope she got a ticket.<\/p>\n

I mean, didn’t she think it was odd that there was someone answering the phone, at a municipal office<\/em>, at 6:30 in the morning? Or that they didn’t answer it with something identifiable, like "hello, parking authority, how can I help you?"<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’m generally not like that, except with obviously stupid people. Here in NYC, I inherited the number of what was some sort of candle wholesaler that went out of business. You would not believe<\/em> the number of people who want to buy candles in bulk (I guess restaurants and such, but still). The calls died down after a year or two, but once in a blue moon, I’ll still get one. After six years, my response now involves telling the caller that they need to invest in a new (free) telephone book. Because, really. Or I’ll get someone who calls my office, where I answer the phone always<\/em> "Hello, [my name]", and they ask for someone else. Um, I’m sorry, you’ve dialed my direct line at a law firm with over a thousand employees, do they work at [major international law firm]? Them: "I don’t know, shouldn’t you know this person?" By this point I’ve found the correct person in our online directory, and I transfer them, but still. Plenty of people realize their mistake and are appropriately apologetic or whatever, but it’s the ones who just keep going, like I’m the receptionist, that drive me nuts.<\/p>\n

Oh, and my home fax number is one area code digit off from the fax number for the intellectual property department of a major midwestern pharmaceutical company. Getting faxes from China with clearly laid out patent applications that contained what were obviously trade secrets was somewhat interesting. I was good here (being a lawyer myself) – I eventually tracked down a paralegal at the pharma company (because I certainly wasn’t calling China), who now reiterates to her foreign legal offices and affiliates that they should definitely be dialing "262" instead of "212". Now I actually keep my fax machine unplugged, because the only time that I’m going to get a fax that’s actually intended for me is when I’m working from home and clearly expect one (since I don’t actually give out my fax number to anyone). And this way anyone who misdials would clearly keep trying until they got the number right, rather than thinking their urgent, deadline-related <\/em> filing information actually got to where it needed to go. The most annoying aspect of the whole thing was that these foreign offices would send faxes during what was their business hours, which usually translated to something like 3 in the morning.<\/p>\n

Heh. That one story certainly mutated in a matter of minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve certainly engaged in my share of passive-aggressive (or just plain aggressive-aggressive) behavior when it comes to things like annoying telemarketers or incompetent customer service representatives, but the New York Times seems to have upped the ante with this article about how people deal (or in some cases, don’t deal) with the annoyances. They got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-miscellaney"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBi-em","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}