I thought I had lost this little gem of a picture.

Earlier this year, I lived with this uber anal corporate lawyer for eight months. The first month after she moved in, while we were still in that polite new-roommate phase, we bought this white board which we mounted proudly and prominently in our living room. At first, the board was always decorated with random doodles and reminders: a turkey for Thanksgiving, a tiny tree for Christmas. Slowly, the doodles began to disappear and were replaced with little notes.

The anal roommate started airing her issues on the board as she left for work in the morning or as she came home late at night, always when my other roommate and I were not around. Her snippets started out as cheerful sentences punctuated with thanks and smileys ("Can you guys please store the pots on top of the fridge? Thanks! :)"), but with every comment left on the board, the tone grew a little less fluffy, a little more curt ("We have a dishwasher. Use it.").

I began to expect to find up to two or three snippy notes a week on the BitchBoard. With each new post, I grew more and more annoyed with her passive-aggressive approach to dealing with apartment issues, particularly since her one-way communication left no room for me to discuss my side of the issue. And she's a freaking lawyer for goodness sakes. Aren't head-on confrontations supposed to be her specialty?

One evening in February, I came home from a long day of work to this page-long, handwritten note hanging from the board, the words "DO NOT THROW AWAY" emblazoned in pink across the top. The BitchBoard was apparently no longer sufficient to contain my roommate's frustrations. I swear, I'm not the neatest person in the world, but I am not the horrendous slob depicted in that note. In disbelief, I began to write a fiery email in reponse, peppered with explectives. Halfway through, I calmed down, deleted a few four-letter words here and there, and composed a rather eloquent e-mail (if I may say so myself) on the inefficiency of using the white board to communicate our frustrations about the apartment. The result was a summit dinner and the end of the snippies. And (in the wise words of my one reader)...the peasants rejoiced.

I moved out a few months later to live with normal people, but a few weeks after moving out I stopped by my old apartment to pick up a few things. There, affixed to the BitchBoard with her trusty "Ithaca is Gorges" magnet was her welcome note to the new girl: a print-out of the article "Real Simple: 19-minute Daily Cleanup."

Good thing I had moved out already or I would have take the passive out of the passive-aggressive approach and decked her in the face.

Watch out passiveaggressivenotes.com. New submission coming your way! I'm not kidding.