"Life's Little Annoyances: True Tales of People Who Just Can't Take it Anymore" by Ian Urbina

Read the whole book here!

So this was the exact perfect book (yes, I read the whole 185 pages in one sitting) for me last night, when I got up at 12:45 and could not fall asleep until 3:45. It was mindless reading, while hilariously entertaining, and completely distracting.

The book contains examples of every day annoying things, and how various people have dealt with them. The best ones involved a combination of clever passive aggressiveness and profitable inventions.

Examples: Getting back at the roommate who steals the icecream you have hidden and labeled with your name by hiding a layer of salt across the whole thing. Haha!

The guy who went to the bank to deposit a $95,000 fake check, you know, the kind you get in your junk mail? And it cleared. And legally he could have held on to it, but instead he just wanted the bank to admit in writing that they screwed up. He ended up returning the money and writing an off-Broadway play about the ordeal, which lasted many long months. That was funny.

The guys who decided to collect a million free AOL CDs and then go on a road trip to AOL headquarters to deliver them, saying, "You've Got Mail!" I wonder if they ended up doing it.

The guy in the 15 item grocery line who, when there is someone behind him with more than 15 items, counts how many items he has out loud.

The guy who invented the CD case opener.

The guy who invented the Rejection Hotline.

The guy whose wife was annoyed because the waiter would always hand him the bill, even though she was the one to take her credit card out and put it in the carrier thing. His retort to her was always, "Well, I have the penis." This annoyed her a lot. He started signing his credit card in legible cursive: "I have the penis." Twelve years later, his wife saw him do it, and was annoyed. He said that nobody, not one of the restaurants they had been to in the last 12 years had noticed. That's funny.

The guy who was asked if he could be put on hold by Verizon, and he answered, "sure," but then realized the customer service person needed a "yes/no" explicitly stated. So he kept saying, "if you must," or "I guess," until the other person had to confront him on it.

The guy who gets his revenge on the annoying adult video store by honking every time he goes by, which invariably freaks out the customers going in.

The dog owner who made little flags with toothpicks and stuck them in dog turds in the park, to point out how people should pick it up.


My favorite: the guy who got annoyed at the cheesy motivational posters, and started Demotivators and Despair.inc, now a multimillion dollar company! Ha!