Infinitesimal Passive Aggressive acts...

[FridayNightFever]

I have a few little tiny things that give me a little bit of glee in a slightly passive aggressive way...

For eg... We have some nice cutlery and some not quite so nice. When giving it out at dinner time, I will give the slightly less nice stuff to the person in my family who has annoyed me the most. I'm almost certain nobody has a clue (the differences between nice/not nice are tiny) but I get quiet satisfaction from doing this.

When sending an email to colleagues, I'll add them in the 'To' box in the order of current favourite to least. Again, I'm certain they won't notice but it gives me a little bit of pass agg joy.

Does anyone else do things like this?

Slippery slope to mushrooms in a beef wellington 😉

Yeah i give them the benefit of the doubt being subconscious or having a crush but sometimes I can imagine them dreading even typing a person's email so they leave them last. People always run off first to or prioritise ones they like. This is the stuff that today I feel glad I'm on MN to read about because I couldn't prove it happened, I noticed it but I knew I'd be told I'm overthinking or paranoid even...but there you go, it can intentionally happen to put down someone.

They’re a key component, why would that be passive aggressive?

I assume it's in reference to the Australian woman who poisoned her inlaws with beef wellington that had deadly mushrooms in it

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdezzxnn7kjo.amp

So toxic mushrooms then, would’ve helped understand the post!

Well I thought it was a good and very appropriate joke 😂😂😂

I am genuinely LOLing at this. So much so that my DS in the next room just asked me what I’m laughing at 🤣🤣🤣

I have hundreds [1]of coffee mugs.
If you get a Rightmove one it means I'm not so keen on you.

[1] only slight exaggeration.

I think a little bit of passive aggression or passive resistance is ideal in some circumstances, like the time I was on the tube holding on to one of the centre poles and some bloke decided he wanted to rest his whole back against the pole instead of using his hand. I rotated my hand slightly and made my knuckles a bit more pointy so that it was too uncomfortable for him. He lasted about 3 seconds and turned and held on instead, looking grumpy. The carriage filled up even more at the next stop so I had done a favour to another two or three people that they didn't even know about because they also held on to the centre pole.

I also remember when DS was tiny he LOVED blueberries, but the resulting nappies were a horror, so I tended to mostly let him have blueberries on Fridays and Saturdays so that the bad nappies were on Saturdays and Sundays when DH and I alternated nappy changes. Not so much passive aggressive really as evening the odds because I still sometimes had the bad nappies.

I think a little bit of passive aggression or passive resistance is ideal in some circumstances

Indeed. Some people deserve this and if they weren't arseholes to begin with we wouldnt need to do it

I got it straight away!

I do the email order thing too! I used to work with someone who was incredibly self important and I’d always put his email address last, just to annoy him. One time I was really peeved so I excluded him completely and then forwarded it to him and said, ‘my apologies, I meant to include you
in this’. 😂

In a previous role I did the email address order thing. I had a colleague who consistently undermined me and refused to cooperate frequently, my boss was useless because totally adverse to any confrontation. There was no HR and short of kicking up an unholy stink, which would have been unprofessional and a huge overreaction, there was little I could do that I hadn't tried.

It relieved some annoyance while I looked for another job!

There is a 'mean girls' team, they have a boss babe who has a very toxic attitude (with a delightful sprinkling of casual racism and a not so subtle horror of anyone not pretty, slim, gym fit, feminine, white and middle class). After she started, all the good staff left, and the remainders conformed, concentrated and gelled into a nasty cult of spite and haughtiness. Their conduct spirals unchecked, as boss babe is best friends with the wife of the CEO

If I have to reply to an action request from them, I put the responding email on the system so it arrives just before the end of the working day, I time it perfectly so they have just enough time, but have to have a flurry of activity to get it sorted just before leaving.

I log it on the system at that time, so if they complain (which they will sooner or later) I can look innocent and provide system timestamp info that shows it generated the fix at that time, and I immediately sent it to them.

I deliberately make my husband's orange squash a little weaker than I know he likes and won't let the tap run before I fill it up so it's not as cold. He's never said anything and I only do it when he's really irritating me.

Why do you think people haven't noticed? Some of these seem pretty obvious to be on the receiving end of.

My email auto-suggests people to add, and I just click through intill I have everyone I need added.

I am now concerned that people are assigning some non-existent slight or power move to what is just pure laziness.

Personally, I dont care if anyone notices.

They are going to look completely unhinged to make a complaint to HR that they've been copied in third in an email or I that signed off with "regards" rather than "kind regards". HR would laugh in their faces.

Thats the entire point and the fun of it- you make it so subtle and so microscopic that even if they did wonder about it, it makes them sound crazy to express it. cackle

@WallaceinAnderland Making Sims of your enemies actually did make me laugh! I used to draw cartoons of people I didn’t like: not of them getting into nasty situations, but just saying whatever it was that annoyed me.

The email thing is interesting. I only do it intentionally sometimes, and most other times I will add people randomly. So I suppose my email ordering is just random in actuality.

And I'm lucky to work in a great team - we all like each other and work well together so, as I mentioned upthread, this for me is nothing more than 'Sarah (not her real name) is my favourite today because she did this thing to help me, whereas John (NHRN) hasn't responded to me yet about that other thing so he's going last'. It's just something tiny that amuses me in a little, smirky way.

The forks are more serious - that is a punishment for arseholery.

When I was a teenager and young adult, I was so bad at reading people, that if someone did these to me, if I had noticed, they might have gone straight over my head, or I might have taken it as a genuine mistake, or even flattery, for example “sorry, I meant to copy you in”, and thought it was nice to be remembered. I didn’t learn to be “paranoid” about such things, until I was much older.

Well, they sound awful.

How on earth do you control the sent AND receive times of your emails so they are different (or have I misunderstood?)

Do you live in St Mary's Mead?!

Seems like a lot of effort for relatively little reward

Giving someone a slightly less nice fork is really no effort.
And the only reward I seek is a little, tiny, internal smirk.