Passive-Aggressive Notes is a website that documents "painfully polite and hilariously hostile notes from shared spaces the world over." Most of these notes are found in shared apartments, offices, apartment buildings and stores. Passive-Aggressive Notes is similar to other projects like Found Magazine and PostSecret that also collect handwritten notes, and shares a similar 'blog' format (where readers send in their own entries to the site) as the humor sites [1] Photoshop Disasters,[2]com Not Always Right,[3] Overheard in the ER,[4] Unfortunate Names and [5] Things My Mother Said.
The site was founded in May 2007, by Kerry Miller, a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. According to the site "for the purposes of this project, we’re using a pretty broad definition of 'passive-aggressive' that roughly correlates with how the term is popularly used. As the New York Times wrote: 'the classic description of the behavior captures a stubborn malcontent, someone who passively resists fulfilling routine tasks, complains of being misunderstood and underappreciated, unreasonably scorns authority and voices exaggerated complaints of personal misfortune.'"
Passive Aggressive Notes (or P.A.N.) has spawned a book published by Collins. In the United States and Canada it is titled Passive-Aggressive Notes while in the United Kingdom and Australia it is titled Your Mother Doesn’t Work Here.
1. The Boston Phoenix 8/1/07, "Dishes Must Be Done Before Bedtime" http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid44789.aspx
2. Passive Aggressive Notes "WTF" http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/wtf/