The best way to confront passive aggressive people is often to return the favor. Noisy neighbors? Be loud. Cat sits too far away to be pet? Move over. Passive aggressiveness is like the Cold War of human behavior.

The_Chuckie asked: What's the most passive aggressive thing you have done/ have had done to you?

Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.


Uhh... why?

I got stuck in the middle of roommate spat where my roommates would unplug the internet modem when they left for work. They slept and worked at opposite ends of the day, one really early and the other late. I had a normal day shift so I would wake up in the morning and have to plug in the modem in, and plug it in again when I got off work.

MaybeNotABear

Doing it wrong, I can remote ban MAC addresses on the router from the app or any browser, your roommate should randomly turn access on and off on the other one.

It will probably turn on after your roommate does some troubleshooting, like rebooting or unplugging and plugging back in, and so they will probably do that every time it happens and have no idea it's not actually working.

fizgigtiznalkie

I feel that would be escalating from being passively aggressive to actively aggressive.

bepperb

No active aggression would be hitting them with the modem.

GhostlyDegree

Listen to the animals.

My friends dog hated her new boyfriend. When he would first start staying the night at her house he would take a poop in this guys boots. We have no idea how he could aim his turds right into the boot. Magical really.

OtherwiseDoubtful

My cat did the same thing. The first night my new boyfriend stayed over he got annoyed with her for trying to cuddle (he wanted the bed to ourselves IYKWIM) and told her he was going to eat her if she didn't get out of the bedroom.

Woke up in the morning and she had pissed all over his shoes. Tons of other shoes in the front hall, never did it before or since. She was so angry at him lol.

HeyYoEowin

Shady.

Today in an editorial meeting funnily enough. I'd drafted an article for a magazine I'm contributing to for a client.

One of their directors walked into the meeting and laid his bundle of notes down, carefully split so I could see a print out of my article with the word YAWN scribbled across it on top of one of the piles.

Sinnistrall

Y es! A wesome W ork N amaste!

Be flattered.

SCHMUCKLES_

Middle finger, except with a sandwich.

Ex wife would pick up subs on the way home from work for herself and the kids.

"Oh you wanted one too? I thought you wouldn't be hungry."

lodger238

I see why she is an Ex.

IGuessIllGoFuckMyself

Yeah that's pretty obviously passive aggressive! Even if you weren't hungry, sandwiches keep. Just stick it in the fridge until you're hungry, no problem. And I don't know what your timeframe is, but if she had a cellphone she could obviously have called you to ask if you wanted anything.

OneGoodRib

Walking quietly is free and polite.

One of my neighbors barrels down the stairs in our foyer like a fat kid on Christmas and proceeds to slam the front door so hard I've had pictures fall over. I made an informational poster about how to not be a dick when other people live near you and hung it next to the stairs.

My door is directly next to the front door. Everyone else is considerate.

Boof_Dawg

i lived on the second floor of a 3 floor apartment and one of our upstairs neighbors would seemingly put on her boots right after she got up before getting ready for work and would stomp back and forth for like 45 mins at 6 a.m. We all went up there one day to ask her to please not her boots on until she's ready to leave the house. Whe was super apologetic and assured us she'd stop, but like a week later it continued.

xKittyForeman

Wait for it...

I had a roommate who thought bringing a full sized drum set into a shared house and jamming out for hours in the room next to mine starting at midnight was acceptable behavior. She also ruined some of my plates. Didn't even apologize and just thew them out. When I confronted her about it apparently it was my fault they weren't microwave safe and they were "tacky anyway" She took my clothes out of the washer in the laundry building and left them on the counter because "she had somewhere to be" when I informed her that I also had somewhere to be she said I was less important. But I still finished my laundry first cause I was there first.

So she took a pink marker and cracked the ink tube open and poured it into my clothes in the dryer then denied it. She always hogged the bathroom and would stand outside the door when I showered to try to force me to come out sooner. I took to showering at 3 a.m. just to avoid her. But one day she came to the door at 3 a.m. and was like "you're using all the hot water. You better not be using my body scrub" I had never even touched her body scrub. Until that moment. I opened her scrub, I peed into it. I mixed it all up, and closed the lid and put it back.

amitoughenouss

Cats do this all the time; they are the masters of passive aggressiveness.

Sometimes when I call my cat over so I can pet her she comes to me but sits just inches away from where I can reach her.

CrazyCatLady55461

It's either this or the 'ass in the face' stance. Until you adjust them and softly push them over so they can curl into a cat ball.

zangor

Reading, that embarrassing skill.

I was reading a book on the bus when a stranger sat next to me. "Cool that you're reading that out in the open. It's like you don't care what anyone thinks."

The book was a bestseller, no sex, nothing salacious. Just a normal sci-fi thriller.

brandynburner

Hey, it's cool that you can admit that to the world. It's like you don't care what anyone thinks

Crabbagio

Tell them you feel bad for them and would love to teach them to read.

fuzzychaos

Why be passive? This is illegal.

There is an industrial van that parks badly in front of my house often turning 4 parking spaces into 2 or 3 by parking right in the middle of the island. Then it doesn't move for 3 or 4 weeks at a time. After a couple weeks I start putting the date on sticky notes and attaching them every couple days as I wander by.

littlep2000

Can you call parking enforcement to have it towed? Most cities have a limit of 72 hours even on residential streets before they will tow cars.

Magic8Ballalala

Technically, yea. But it does seem to belong to someone that lives nearby and it isn't being lived in so it isn't making my life largely worse.

Also my city has a long list of crap that falls above this sort of thing to the point where a vehicle needs to look abandoned (flat tire, missing parts, broken window) before they will actually get a move on with towing.

littlep2000littlep2000

Take that for being annoying.

Whenever I'm angry at my sister I go into her computers bios (it doesn't need a password for that) and make her speakers only go to 75%.

argf00

Better off limiting her ram (or setting it higher to bsod all the time). Done that to my work mate who pissed me of once. He was the "top" helpdesk guy. But he was useless. Afaik he never fixed it. My other mate also changed shortcut path on his internet explorer (had to be used for compatibility reasons) to open 10,000 notepads. He was a dick. F*ck you Ian.

Zozorak

It's a laptop so the BIOS is pretty limited. It's amazing Dell even has an option for that. It also has an option for disabling cores but that actually slows down the computer so I feel like a dick when she's complaining that her computer is being really slow, I don't do that anymore.

argf00