Life's Little Annoyances: True Tales of People Who Just Can't Take It Anymore (Hardcover)

by Ian Urbina (Author)
Key Phrases: cell phone talkers, New York, Weapons of the Weak, New Jersey (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Somewhere between passive aggressive and passionate aggression lies the perfect humorous response to an irritating event. Writer Ian Urbina—who started this project by writing an article for the New York Times and attracting legions of the slightly annoyed—has compiled a lovely collection of non-injurious (but highly mean) solutions that soothe the cranky soul.

The introduction gets off to a brilliant start: Urbina coated a pint of his frequently "borrowed" ice cream with a thick layer of salt, driving his ice cream thief of a housemate to furiously outing herself as the culprit. Additional tales offer websites that reject unappealing date prospects for you, examples of anti-honking haiku distributed on telephone poles all over Brooklyn and a flat-out heartening recounting of the original parking meter fairies in Anchorage, AK.

Heartening fairies and websites providing confrontation avoidance techniques aside, this is no typical relax-and-be-nice book that help readers calm down and appreciate life. Instead, it offers the dual purpose of giving everyone a chance to appreciate the sheer creative genius lurking in your average curmudgeon while inspiring the world to further feats of nearly meaningless anger management Jill Lightner

Product Description
What can you do when the world is pushing you over the edge? More than you think.

For some of us, it’s the automated voice that answers the phone when we’d rather talk to a real person. For others, it’s the fact that Starbucks insists on calling its smallest-sized coffee "tall." Or perhaps it’s those pesky subscription cards that fall out of magazines. Whatever it is, each of us finds some aspect of everyday life to be particularly maddening, and we often long to lash out at these stubborn irritants of modern life.

In Life’s Little Annoyances, Ian Urbina chronicles the lengths to which some people will go when they have endured their pet peeves long enough and are not going to take it any more. It is a compendium of human inventiveness, by turns juvenile and petty, but in other ways inspired and deeply satisfying. We meet the junk-mail recipient who sends back unwanted "business reply" envelopes weighted down with sheet metal, so the mailers will have to pay the postage. We commiserate with the woman who was fed up with the colleague who kept helping himself to her lunch cookies, so she replaced them with dog biscuits that looked like biscotti. And we revel in the seemingly endless number of tactics people use to vent their anger at telemarketers, loud cellphone talkers, spammers, and others who impose themselves on us.

A celebration of the endless variety of passive aggressive behavior, Life’s Little Annoyances will provide comfort and inspiration to everyone who has ever gritted his teeth and dreamed of sweet retribution against the slings and arrows of outrageous people.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Times Books; 1st edition (October 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805080309
• ISBN-13: 978-0805080308
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #483,959 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Massive, Passive Fun , November 10, 2005

By	John Kador (Winfield PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There's a scene in the movie Animal House when John Belushi announces, "What we need here is a really futile gesture!" Life's Little Annoyances is an inventory of really futile gestures that are nevertheless very satisfying. The author is a reporter for the NY Times and he brings a reporter's eye for detail, skepticism, and irony to the book. When faced with life's little annoyances, some people really confront the problem, unafraid of confrontation, taking fearless direct action to resolve the problem. Those are not the people described in this book. Life's Little Annoyances presents a hilarious inventory of mostly futile gestures, and the response is laughter at the myriad ways we humans avoid confrontation and pretend we are accomplishing something by subversive futility.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smart, funny, and easy to read, October 29, 2005

By	Timothy Nelson (Denver, Colorado) - See all my reviews

This is light reading. Something my dad would like. The book's selling point - at least for me - was the idea itself. There is something strangely interesting and, dare i say, inspiring in seeing of how people deal with all the little tedium of life. Petty, yes - but universal and gratifying. Aside from their vicarious pleasure, the tales were fulfilling almost for their pettiness, not in spite it. Mostly, the stories were fun because they not only feature frustrations that everyone can relate to. (I think. Well, at least everyone I know could relate to it.) But it was also fun because of the deviously clever things that people did in response to these little frustrations. Aside from the introduction of the book, which is laugh-out-loud funny, I had a couple sections that I really liked. The story about the guy who would slip expensive little things like condoms and razor refills into the shopping cart of people who double park their cart in the middle of supermarket aisles? Awesome. I also liked the story about the guy who overpayed parking tickets by 3 cents to get back at the parking officials by forcing extra paper work on them and by forcing them to cut a refund check. The one about how people deal with dog owners who dont pick up after their dogs is truly bizarre. I had read a couple of the topics before. Examples: TV-B-Gone, the mini-universal remote control that you can attach to your key chain to turn off annoying televisions in waiting rooms and bars. Same went for the Knee Defendor - a little plastic thingy for preventing the people sitting in front of you on planes from leaning their seat back too far. BUT, it was still sort of cool to hear the stories behind the inventors and the experiences that motivated them.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You can't kill 'em, but you can exact revenge, January 18, 2006

By	Debra Hamel (TwitterLit.com) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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 [...] 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.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece