Urbina, Ian: Life's Little Annoyances

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Those oblivious, the-world-revolves-around-me types who leave their grocery carts in the middle of the aisle, chain mail forwarders, spammers and telemarketers and express line abusers--they're not criminals, exactly, so you can't lock them away or kill them. Still, in their small abuses they detract significantly from the quality of our lives day to day, and for that they merit some kind of punishment. But how precisely to go about it? New York Times reporter Ian Urbina may have some ideas for you in his book Life's Little Annoyances: True Tales of People who Just Can't Take it Anymore.

Starting with his own experiences exacting revenge from a roommate who was routinely pilfering his cookie dough ice cream, Urbina includes some 70 stories about people fighting back against the rude and unthinking among us. His short tales of righteous revenge--the ideas are not all his own, but were collected from the fed-up people described by his subtitle--are divided among nine chapters by genre of annoyance: from mail-related (junk mail, the profusion of AOL disks one receives), to service-related (overly zealous store employees), to the vehicular (tailgaters, proselytizing bumper stickers).

The most even-tempered of readers may choose to turn the other cheek when irritated by life's smaller annoyances. The rest of us will probably come across a few ideas in Urbina's book that we'd like to try out ourselves. I can see myself, for example, putting telemarketers on "hold"--that is, on speakerphone, so they can listen while I finish dinner, change a diaper, watch TV, etc. And I am intrigued by the idea of mailing off blank "blow-in" cards, those subscription cards that fall out of magazines all the time, so that the company responsible for them will have to pay postage. But while I admire him for it, I would not have the gall myself to imitate one man's sweetly cruel response to pushy sales clerks who can't take "I'm just browsing" for an answer....

Ian Urbina's Life Little Annoyances is a quick, titillating little read. Have fun with it.