Courtesy Henry Holt and Company

Web-Exclusive Book Review Life's Little Annoyances: True Tales of People Who Just Can’t Take It Anymore By Ian Urbina (Times Books/Henry Holt and Company, November 2005) Review by Allan Fallow, November 2005 , April 2006

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Cell phone loudmouths, prying cashiers, public TVs: little blips on the radar screen of life bug Ian Urbina big-time. In this caustic and cathartic collection of revenge fantasies come true, the Washington, D.C.-based reporter for The New York Times takes a heartening look at human resourcefulness—and revenge—in the face of robotic corporations, voice-mail purgatory, and neighbors probing the extremes of loutish behavior.

Life's Little Annoyances: True Tales of People Who Just Can't Take It Anymore may not net its author a MacArthur Foundation grant, but some of the payback documented in Urbina's deft chapbook approaches pure genius. Denizens of the modern world will find it gratifying to sample the author's recipes for meting out on-the-spot punishment to spammers and scammers, telemarketers and pledge drive proles, feckless coworkers and faceless corporate drones. Revenge, Urbina clearly believes, is a dish best served piping hot.

As you might expect of a man with history degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, Urbina takes pains to ascribe a lofty aim to the lowly actions collected here: "Why focus on such petty behavior? The answer is simple: Because it is the stuff of everyday survival. And our myriad coping mechanisms offer a clear window onto the complicated mix of humor, anger, creativity, and irrationality that makes us all so human."

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Those qualities certainly define the de facto leader of the Can't Take It Anymore Movement, 48-year-old San Francisco inventor Mitch Altman. Peeved when a restaurant TV disrupted a dinner with friends, Altman devised a "discreet and universal remote" capable of shutting off just about any idiot box you point it at. My own empirical research—conducted in a North Carolina bar on October 22, 2005—proved Altman's brainchild, TV-B-Gone, to be fiendishly effective at surreptitiously silencing Public Nuisance Number One.

Equally inventive irkees—the piqued and the bilked, the stiffed and the shafted, America's put-upon class—crowd the pages of Life's Little Annoyances.

There's educator Susan Lulic, who shames inconsiderate dog owners by spray-painting gold any "unclaimed mound" she finds when walking her own dog. There's school administrator Chris Marzuk, who battles the scourge of loose magazine subscription cards by returning them with the publisher's name and address filled in. Most memorably, there's Brooklyn freelance writer Aaron Naparstek, who made things better by making them verse: As gridlocked drivers blew their horns outside his apartment each morning at six, Naparstek composed—and later posted on light poles nearby—17-syllable therapeutic poems he dubbed honku. Transported, his fellow New Yorkers pasted up their own flights of poetic justice, including this anonymous gem:

As he chronicles America's long-overdue backlash at the unkindness of strangers, Urbina discovers that one-upmanship has its rewards. California lawyer Ira Goldman, for example, invents a simple plastic wedge to block "aggressive" plane seat recliners, then sells more than 10,000 Knee Defenders at $15 per pair. Artist Ian Duval repays his neighbors' rowdiness, with interest, by recording 20 tracks of noxious noises—from a drill to slamming doors to a child practicing scales on a violin—and selling it online as the "Revenge CD" (earplugs included).

Are certain personality types more easily peeved than others? Apparently so: Little Annoyances abounds with designers and webheads, middle-school administrators and professional musicians, college students, waiters, writers, and editors—that strain of humans who passionately believe in the ultimate perfectability of the universe. If you're among them, you'll find solace and strength in the arsenal of payback weapons inventoried here, including junkbusters.com, rejecthotline.com, and the diabolically dissuasive e-mail address anyname@papernapkin.net.

You're just as likely to be outraged, of course, by the panoply of civic vexations that Urbina omits: escalator riders who stand on the left; bottleneckers and rubberneckers; usherless theaters and their spawn, the movie motor mouth; public snappers of bubblegum; bike-path bogarts; and the mother of all botherations, librarians who paste UPC labels over book-cover blurbs.

On the other hand, if you rejoice at the sight of ceiling-mounted TVs bathing our public spaces in flicker light; if you breeze into the express aisle with 23 items in your cart; if, indeed, you find anything the least bit nettlesome about this review, I invite you to e-mail me at afallow@papernapkin.net. A word of warning before you do: this weapon of mass deflection is likely to rank high on your scale of life's little annoyances.

Allan Fallow is the managing editor of AARP Books.

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