Passive-Aggressive Notes

There is something in the psyche of the passive-aggressive person which inclines them towards leaving little notes. I have been reminded of this while reading in the wonderful Lucy Melford's blog (here which is also my source for the quotations as well as the illustration) about a bridge in Dorset which surely contains the world's most monumental of these notes.

Lucy, in common with me, thinks that this is a slightly excessive response to whatever the perceived problem was:

Really? Transportation for life - presumably to Australia - just for doing something to this bridge? Gosh, times were hard in the eighteenth century! And doing what? Painting seditious slogans on it? ('King George is a very bad man and much too Hanoverian') Sticking scandalous leaflets to it? ('Squire Benville is a seducer, cheats at cards, and must not be elected') Or chipping away at the brickwork? (In hard times the poor burned bricks, if they couldn't get coal)
And this wasn't an important bridge. It was on a country road. A road that might have been the best in the local area, but not a major through route. The bridge itself was a modest affair, spanning a little stream, and the stream was merely a parish boundary.

This post has reminded me of the various note-writers I have known in my life. The only one getting on the Hound's tits at the moment is the concierge of my apartment building. Well, only one of the concierges really, and if I was less of a bastard I would probably remind myself that she is only concerned about keeping a tidy environment and maintaining a certain tone among the residents. The trouble is she leaves her notices absolutely everywhere and they are all in the vein of 'if whoever doesn't stop doing such and such this instant we'll find out who you are and come after you'. I may be slightly exaggerating but that is very much the cumulative effect of these notices.
It obviously isn't limited to our concierge. If you step into any apartment building or place where a bunch of people share the space to whatever extent, you can tell what the 'issues' are by the notes. I looked at a flat in another building where there was a notice in the lift telling people to stop leaving rubbish about in the corridors. Fair enough. When the estate agent showed me my flat, there was a very stern notice in the entrance hall reminding residents that pets are not allowed under the terms of the lease. The estate agent was very keen to tell me that everyone ignored that requirement, and in fact the last people in my flat were keeping two house rabbits in there.
There are two problems with this note-leaving behaviour. The first is the mindset they come from. Even leaving aside the fact that if you feel obliged to communicate with someone else with a notice, there is obviously something very wrong there. I can't really talk myself: in my INFJ way I expect people to know without being told, what I consider socially acceptable and if they don't they're just beyond the pale for all eternity. In the case of our concierge the impression comes across loud and clear that she believes herself to be in some sort of pitched battle with the residents of the apartments.
The first day I went to collect post from the concierge's office she gave me a welcome pack to the development, which began with a list of things residents were expected not to do, in order to maintain the tone of the development. Put washing out on balconies, for a start. That's not allowed. Residents are expected to clean the inside of the windows once a month. They can f*ck off. I will start doing that when the maintenance company clean the outside of the windows more than once a year and they are actually clean when they've been done.
The second problem with the notice-writing mentality is the actual effect these sort of notices have on their target audience, in fact you can see from my comments above that the concierge has already got my back up and I'm disinclined to be co-operative. Lucy discovered that her Dorsetshire monumental passive-aggressive note had this same effect:

 'Ah,' [a man she met] said, 'That's a proper plaque, but not the original, which is now in a museum. It's a replica. There were attempts to steal the original plaque, so they made a copy and put it away safely. In fact two copies have so far been hacked out and spirited away.' Well, if you could do it, it would make a fabulous souvenir of rural Dorset - although obviously you'd be risking transportation for life. To Australia.

And this is also the case with our concierge's notes. Not that people try to steal them for a souvenir but they have the exactly opposite effect she intends. The lift is a favourite place for her to put them up, and you will often get in there to find that they are all upside down or people have scribbled comments and complaints on them. I have a friend who likes to visit me just so she can have some fun with the concierge's notices. And of course people pay less attention to the notices which actually have to be there by law (a no smoking in public areas one, a fire evacuation one, and anything as a result of a risk assessment).
Needless to say she also has her favourite target behaviours, one of which is the bins. She put up a notice in the lift telling residents to be careful there were no holes in bin bags in case they leaked in the lift. But she was asking for trouble when she put up a sign saying that people must stop just dumping their bin bags in the bin store, they should be but in the bin. I think if that had been it, or it had been phrased as a request people would have paid attention, but she made the mistake of putting in large letters that this is being monitored by CCTV and anyone found dumping rubbish would be fined. Sure enough shortly afterwards, CCTV cameras appeared in the bin stores. Well, you know what I'm like, I always give her a cheery wave when I take my rubbish down, I'm sure it drives her mad. And I'm completely sure she's watching the screen like a hawk because they made the mistake of putting the cameras inside the store so that you can just walk past and throw your bag in without being seen, which is exactly what people do. She was also asking for trouble when she put up a notice telling people not to put large items of rubbish out. The first time after that I had some rubbish I actually couldn't get in the bin store because of the amount of furniture people had left in there!
But she superlatively shot herself in the foot over parcels. If a parcel comes for you, the courier never even brings it up to your flat, they always leave it at the concierge's office, which as you can imagine is about as hospitable and friendly a place as a piranha fish in a prawn cocktail. When I moved in, if a parcel arrived for you, during her 'patrols' (that is the actual word she uses) of the building she would put a note (see a pattern developing here?) through your door saying there was a parcel for you. Of course this note would include a warning that if you hadn't collected it in three days it would automatically be sent back.
To get the parcel you would go to her office and you would have to knock on the locked door - there isn't a doorbell, the door is never open, and there is another notice on it saying that your fob will not let you into her office - and wait until she felt like letting you in, in a very suspicious manner, and eventually give you a parcel. Then she made the mistake (perhaps I should say that there is actually a concierge team, but I can tell the one responsible for the notes by the turn of phrase and the attitude) of sending out a notice saying that these notes about parcels would no longer be given out, residents would be expected just to turn up for their parcels when they arrived without being told.
Perhaps I should say that the development is in the Chinese Quarter, so there are a lot of residents expecting parcels from the other side of the world with no guarantee of when they will turn up at all, which in addition to the concierge's attitude may explain what happened yet. It back-fired on her spectacularly, because what happened was that all the residents of the flats (all 450 of them) went to ask every day whether anything had come for them. The queue used to come out of the office and snake down the path. After that she took people's email addresses to let them know.
I actually tend not to have run-ins with her. The only one I don't like is the night concierge, who I can tell in common with The Night Staff everywhere doesn't want to do anything. But our lift broke recently, and the notice she put up being apologetic about it was defaced by someone moaning about the inconvenience of going up the stairs. She was obviously pissed off about this, and I actually expected her to put up a notice saying not to deface her notices. Instead she put up a progress report about the repair of the lift which began with the words 'This is a polite notice...' Now I don't care who you are, that's fighting talk the world over.
Shortly afterwards a parcel came for me and I got the usual email. I went over twice in one day to get it, only to find there was nobody in the concierge's office. I went once the next day with no success, and shortly afterwards she sent me an email headed FINAL REMINDER in capital letters about it. I sent her back an icy email saying that since I had been for it three times without success I expected them  not to return it to the sender until I had been for it, and began the email with the words, 'This is a polite email'.
Her reply was an absolute classic of being torn between feeling she had to apologise to me and just plain fury. She said how sorry she was that I had been over so many times without getting my parcel but asked me to remember how much the concierge had to do, and so on. Of course after that I was in no rush to go and get it. I waited until the night shift and sauntered over so that that I could annoy the night concierge by giving him something to do as well.
Passive-aggressive notes don't work, they just create the opposite of what you want.