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Original poster

Best passive aggressive/petty moments..

588 replies

LittleMissUnreasonable · 11/05/2022 16:49

The other day I was trying to park in one of those private run car parks where there are no designated spaces. There was only one quite awkward space left and there was another car behind me who was practically sat on my tail trying to get this awkward spot. I decided to reverse out and find another car park but this tailgating car was not letting me go go as they were so hell-bent on getting this space and were trying to go around me. I just thought screw it and drove into the spot as I had nowhere to go. You could practically see the red mist coming from the driver's ears as they had to reverse and find another car park 😤

Another consistent one is that we have a manager who will without fail walk up to a small group of colleagues with a query and direct it to the men, completely ignoring the women. So now, even if I know the answer and the male colleague doesn't, I will just get on with my work and not intervene. It's funny to see the manager flapping around trying to work out the answer when he could have just asked...you know...a woman😱

OP posts:
DinosaursEatMan · 12/05/2022 21:30

I used to have a deeply unpleasant colleague who was a complete busybody. They also claimed, frequently and at great length, to be allergic to perfume.
Unfortunately it’s one of my loves and I have a large and varied collection. I had always avoided wearing it at work. Until that point.
They gave my office and person a very wide berth after that.

Yellowbluepinklillies · 12/05/2022 21:30

Loobyloo68 · 12/05/2022 15:11

Exh was alcoholic, I'm trying to bring up 3 kids and work. I'm earning it, hes spending it in the pub, while I'm in bed (nightshifts). Made him a pie with dogfood that he ate after he came home from another pub binge. Laughed all week after hed ate it. He didn't think it was funny

My aunt once did this

back in the 80’s she got pregnant to an alcoholic who used to beat her up
he stole from her,beat her,did some pretty degrading things to her sexually,would shit in the corner of their bedroom and make her clean it up and when she was 7 months pregnant with twins,he pushed her down the stairs-which sent her into labour and both babies where born-one died a few days later-the other thankfully survived,but only just

where was he?
in bed with her sister

he used to come home pissed and pee/vomit all over my baby cousin,would pee all over the flat,tried to force my aunt to sleep with other men he brought home from the pub-for money-in short he was a real bastard

anyway,one night he came home pissed up and demanded she make him a chilli con carne,(she makes lovely food and has worked in some top restaurants) so she rang my dad and got him to bring round a tin of our dogs food
she made the chilli con carne and he said it was the best he’d ever had
She managed to get away not long after and brought my cousin up as a single mum for a while until she remarried

cant say I feel too bad after what he put her through-I know she never regretted anything

Giraffesandbottoms · 12/05/2022 21:31

When DS turned 3 SIL bought him a small nerf gun. We werent particularly impressed. 4 years later when her DS turned 3 DH managed to find the same small nerf gun. SIL looked horrified and said who buys such a gift for a small child? DH looked her in the eye and said you did

I have a plan to do this with my brother who bought my just 3 year old 7+ Lego when we had a 1 year old too. Although when DS poured it all on the ground and his 10 month old stuck it in his mouth I think he may have realised it was a pretty stupid and unsafe gift!

BlackAmericanoNoSugar · 12/05/2022 21:38

The one that I remember best is my passive-aggressive attempt that completely failed. At work we used to sit in desk groups of three or four, so naturally people would make tea or coffee for the group in a rough sort of rota depending on who was thirsty and who was less busy etc.

One of the women used to complain bitterly that I made her tea too weak, although I gave the tea bag a good stir in the cup and let it brew for ages. So I decided to make one that she would complain was too strong for a change. I started hers off before I made the others, I used two (possibly three) tea bags. I mashed the tea bags around for ages and left it there to stew while I went to the loo. Then I came back and made the other cups, gave hers a blast in the microwave, another stir and mash before I took the teabags out. At least ten minutes of brewing at this stage. Then put a tiny drop of milk into it and took all the cups back to our desks. Then watched closely to see the horror on her face at the immensely strong cup of tea.

She took a sip and said "Oh BANS, that's a lovely cup of tea." So I had to make it that way until at team reorganisation put us on different groups of desks. Grin

Musmerian · 12/05/2022 21:39

ThatWriterInTheCorner · 12/05/2022 09:21

If you know me you'll already know this story, so this will absolutely out me, but I enjoy telling it so I don't care. On my first day back to work after mat leave with DD, our resident office knobber decided to share his opinion that "if" he ever had children then he and his (entirely theoretical) partner would never put them into nursery. Instead, he would earn enough money for his partner to stay at home and look after their baby. Lovely.

Important background info: Office Knobber, like many of us, often ate his lunch at his desk, using cutlery borrowed from the office canteen for this purpose. The canteen staff (quite reasonably) didn't appreciate us wandering off with all their cutlery, and would regularly make requests for the return of all their missing items. At the time, Office Knobber had managed to accumulate a massive collection of spoons and forks. (He wasn't going to take the cutlery back to the canteen, on account of being A Very Important Knobber.)

So I waited until he was out of the office for a good four-day stretch, and then I collected up all his spoons and forks from where they were scattered among his belongings and laid them out in a long, neat row, right across his desk. There were really quite a lot of them. It looked amazing. Also,completely unhinged. After a while, a couple of people walked past his desk and saw it and said, "That's brilliant" and then the word obviously got out, because over the next four days, people started coming from all over the building to make a pilgrimage to see the desk of this strange, strange man, inexplicably covered with contraband cutlery. My proudest moment was when the factory manager came from over the road to have a look. (We were all in marketing, and were therefore a bit annoying and poncey, so having someone with a real job like Factory Manager come and visit us in our natural habitat felt like a special experience).

The best part was that most of our visitors thought he'd done it himself, for inexplicable Knobber reasons of his own. The general consensus seemed to be that 1) this was somehow about what they'd expect of him (somehow) and 2) they'd always thought he was a wrong 'un and were glad to have their suspicions confirmed.

And then when he came back, I got the enjoy the even bettest best part: before he could even put down his laptop, he had to collect up all the cutlery and do the Walk Of Shame up to the canteen to return it. And because there was so much of it, all the canteen staff hated him for ever more and he always got the edge piece on pie day and he never got extra chips ever, ever again. And for the rest of his time at the company, he was known throughout every department as "that weird marketing guy who had all the cutlery on his desk".

Revenge: a dish best served with seventeen spoons and twenty-one forks.

Genius. It’s like a short story.

Musmerian · 12/05/2022 21:45

@TaysideTeuchter - the word is cunt. Not sure why everyone is being so coy.

BoDerek · 12/05/2022 21:46

babyjellyfish · 12/05/2022 19:10

Someone once parked their car halfway across my drive so I wrote a long message on their windscreen in greasy lip balm and sat in my front window watching for them to come back.

This has reminded me of a little incident when I was a kid. I was 9 and for some reason spent the day at work with my dad. I was very wide eyed to see that a random had parked in one of the car spaces and promptly reported this to my dad who was a very mild mannered chap. One of his colleagues said, pop a sticker on the windscreen and I took to the task with gusto. Kids and stickers! I took a roll of large orange stickers down to the carpark and covered the windscreen. I had absolutely no idea that it was ott or that they would be nigh impossible for the driver to remove, it was a very innocent response to instructions.
it’s only now and upon reflection that I understand why my dad and his colleague were laughing so much when I got back upstairs 😂 😂

BoDerek · 12/05/2022 21:56

RachelGreeneGreep · 12/05/2022 13:58

I did that one time with a company who added a H into my name so my reply was to Dhavid or Mhark or whhatever 😉.

Show quote history

I really love these 😂

Mummyratbag · 12/05/2022 22:00

@Daftasabroom - ha ha I like your style, unfortunately, if I tried that I would probably be the one in the hedge.

ZarquonsSandals · 12/05/2022 22:27

Petty, not P-A. And not my personal story.

My friend used to work in a large multi-national bank. One of the big ones with only companies as customers, and with no UK 'shop floor' (everything was done online or via traders). Friend worked in a back office processing paperwork, and had nothing to do with any customers.
One day a big cheese was visiting from HQ (USA) and she happened to be in the lift with him to the floor of the building their office was on. He didn't say anything to her, and she had no idea who he was, but as he had security passes to get in, it wasn't a concern.
Later, her manager told her that big cheese had noticed, in the lift, that her hair colour (mahogany tinted) was "not in keeping with the corporate image". Apparently the next day she went into work with pillar box red hair.
And yes, she had checked her contract about workwear, etc. which made no mention of hair colour.

WisherWood · 12/05/2022 22:29

theDudesmummy · 12/05/2022 12:37

Some enjoyable stuff in the thread but I truly can't understand the people going on about racism. It was absolutely clear what that poster meant. Do people REALLY think someone would come onto a thread on MN and state that their husband's card had "obviously" been stolen by a black man, and not mean it sarcastically??

That's how I read it. Seemed bloody obvious it was sarcastic rather than racist. I am however now enjoying the descent of a thread about passive aggression into petty bickering and squabbling about grammar and comprehension.

BluebellCockleshell123 · 12/05/2022 22:35

I had a colleague who was always trying to undermine me and kept sending paranoid ranting emails to our boss. I think he had some kind of personality disorder and he was extremely difficult to work with.

He liked to have everything on his desk lined up just so and spent ages fiddling around with his mousepad/keyboard/pen/notebook to arrange them at the exact angles.

When he went to the loo I used to move something by just a fraction. And if he was off for the day I would change his seat settings.

It was the little things that kept me going!

TaysideTeuchter · 12/05/2022 22:53

Musmerian · 12/05/2022 21:45

@TaysideTeuchter - the word is cunt. Not sure why everyone is being so coy.

Because I would rather not risk a ban from Mumsnet.

plominoagain · 12/05/2022 22:54

I have mentioned it before , but it amuses me that I got so cross , so I’ll repeat it.

DH and I used to work opposite shifts . If he was doing early turn , I would follow him by doing late turn. When we moved in , at first I would go to work in the afternoon , having left the kitchen tidy , dishwasher etc loaded , only to come home in the early hours of the morning finding the dirty dishes etc left unwashed on the side , so that inevitably , he would swan off to work early , leaving me to do his clearing up from the night before .

After the third time in as many days , I lost the plot . In a fit of temper , I left all the dirty dishes as they were, and then loaded every last clean cup , plate , bowl pot, pan , roasting tin, knife fork, utensil , you name it , into the boot of my car . And took it to work with me . When he got home , all he had to cook with , was his unwashed shit.

Only had to do it once .

JudgeJ · 12/05/2022 22:57

Sheilaroundthefountain · 12/05/2022 15:08

17 years ago we wanted to buy a house on a new development. There were 3 or 4 different house builders (maybe more) building houses for different budgets. We’d researched in advance, and knew that two had the sort of house we wanted in our price range. What we didn’t know was that we should have dressed up, so there we were in jeans and trainers, with 3 and 5 year old children.

Went to the Charles Church show house first, went up to the sales lady and said we were looking to buy a house, please could we look round. She showed us round (was a bit snooty) and then we went back to the office, and said something about being interested in buying and she said ‘we don’t have anything in your price range’ husband said ‘Err you haven’t asked what our budget is yet’, and she replied that she KNEW she didn’t have anything in our budget.

I, very pettily, swiped all her leaflets and brochures of the table, told her to fuck off, and we walked to the other housing developer where we were treated very nicely, and ended up buying a 4 bedroom house.

As someone not prone to being dressed up I've had one or two what I call my Pretty Woman moments when out shopping, Love it!

itsnotmeitsu · 12/05/2022 22:58

To me a lot of messages on here are suggesting aggressive actions, rather than 'passive aggression'. I generally think of passive aggression as somebody taking out their annoyance on someone steathily, so the person on the receiving end doesn't realise it's happening. As such, passive aggression can be a bad thing, but also pretty satisfying 🤔. If my partner's been bloody annoying, I time charging my electric toothbrush to occupy the charger when I know it's about the time he'll want to charge his. [And it takes a few hours.] And yes, I know we could have our own individual chargers, but because it's passive aggression, he hasn't worked that one out.

JudgeJ · 12/05/2022 23:05

MerryMarigold · 12/05/2022 14:19

Lane vigilante 😂. I like to brake slightly and reduce my speed when someone tailgates me.

Brake lights are a dead give away, better to drop down a gear, they have no notice and have to suddenly brake hard.

Sweetrevenge2022 · 12/05/2022 23:13

This one is for everyone who has ever been annoyed with a doctor’s receptionist.

I want to preface this by saying that a couple of the receptionists are absolutely lovely at the surgery, but this one is a jobsworth cow.

My GP had asked me to phone her with the results of a biopsy after I had met with the consultant, as she said the updates from the hospital can take several weeks to come through.

I had my appointment with the consultant and about midday I rang my doctors surgery to speak to my GP as requested to update her.

I explained to the receptionist that the GP had asked me to phone her with the results of a biopsy and receptioncow told me the first available time to talk to my GP was in 3 weeks. I explained again that she had asked me to call her as soon as I had my biopsy results and she again said “and I’m telling you that the first time she can speak to you is in 3 weeks”. She then asked where I had had the biopsy and when I said the name of the hospital she said that a letter would come from them in due course. I said that the GP had said that this could take a few weeks and she wanted me to tell her as soon as I knew - it was her request not mine.

She again said there was no possibility of speaking to her before the 3 weeks.

I then asked if she could pass on a message to my GP instead. Receptioncow sighed loudly and then said huffily, “yes…okay…”. I asked if she had a pen ready and a piece of paper. She did. I then said, “great, can you pop down on the piece of paper that I DO have cancer?”

The line went silent. She spluttered that the doctor would be able to call me that afternoon. “Oh that’s great” I said, slowly and deliciously. She squeezed out quietly “and I’m sorry about your diagnosis”. “Yes” said.

It was the only satisfying part of a shitty day.

Update: I’m on the mend now.

Kat1953 · 12/05/2022 23:17

@Sweetrevenge2022 Bravo!
I'm so glad to read you're recovering now also :)

Porcupineintherough · 12/05/2022 23:19

Neighbours cat used to shit in our tiny garden. Every fucking day. We used to pitch the shit onto their flat roof. Every fucking day, for over a year, until we moved away.

Somethingsnappy · 12/05/2022 23:40

TaysideTeuchter · 12/05/2022 22:53

Because I would rather not risk a ban from Mumsnet.

Show quote history

Nah, mumsnet won't ban anyone for dabbling in a bit of frisky language 😉

TheLadyofShalott1 · 12/05/2022 23:58

Matildatoldsuchdreadfullies · 12/05/2022 08:47

A couple of weeks before Christmas at Bluewater. No parking available at all. All Blue Badge parking in use - a significant amount of those bays used by cars without a badge. Lots of frayed tempers…

Anyway, dsis and I had got there early, and had parked up. We got back to the car and a passing driver asked if we were leaving. My dsis said we were, but that this was a disabled bay. “Oh, don’t worry about that… they never ticket here,” they answered. I assume they’d missed the wheelchair I’d just put in the boot. Dsis waved her keys in the air and pointedly put them in her pocket. We were in a stand off (drive off?) for quarter of an hour before they realised dsis meant business. And even after they left dsis refused to move in case they drove round, and came back.

I’m not entirely sure that the phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” isn’t relevant here. Best part of half an hour it cost us.

Well done and thank you to your dsis, that was brilliant!

StoppinBy · 13/05/2022 00:51

theDudesmummy · 12/05/2022 12:37

Some enjoyable stuff in the thread but I truly can't understand the people going on about racism. It was absolutely clear what that poster meant. Do people REALLY think someone would come onto a thread on MN and state that their husband's card had "obviously" been stolen by a black man, and not mean it sarcastically??

I don't think it's clear at all.

I still don't really think that it's clear that the poster's husband is the black person in the story (unless I missed the poster coming back to clarify that?).

All I see is people trying to explain it in that way but no matter how many times I read the post it still is a badly written and confusing post.

DoorWasAJar · 13/05/2022 00:54

LesMimas · 12/05/2022 04:10

I piped up with 'i think a picture of your hamster (that lives with me) would look good in them' and now my hamster obsessed 5 year old wants a poster sized photo of her hamster in his living room 😂

Love this! So innocent yet so evil 😁

I love the innocent evil too 😃 reminds me of this brilliant evil lady on Waitrose cat food reviews, she told the story of how her DP asked her ‘why are we feeding the cat gourmet food’ and next time she made him dinner, she made pasta and used a tin of the ‘gourmet’ cat food and served it to him - and he ate it up and loved it 😂

JustLyra · 13/05/2022 01:03

I changed my name when I was 14. I loved with my grandparents, we were moving house so a new school was the ideal chance to get rid of the ridiculous name my drug addict, alcoholic parents gave me and properly use the lovely middle name my Nana persuaded them to add.

my Aunt, who always had a huff that her kids missed out on one on one time with the GP’s (which I understand, but I was a kid and we lived with them because it emerged that my fathers idea of discipline involved a hot iron, amongst other things) because of us, refused to acknowledge it.

She posted my birthday card to Oldname Surname.
So I sent one to her, who was by then on her third marriage, addressed to Aunty Second-Husband’s name.

She then sent me a Christmas card (even though we were spending Christmas Day in the same house…) to Oldname Middlename Surname. It had one of those little stickers on the back with the senders details.
So I found a New Year card and sent it to Aunty FirstHusband SecondHusband ThirdHusband