Hmmmmm. A few of these were inspired, very funny, or even practical:

* www.sweetchillisauce.com: Hilarious (and consistently entertaining!) scamming of would-be Nigerian scammers.

* www.junkbusters.com: I have used tips from this site for a couple of years, and I have dramatically reduced the amount of junk mail I get. Less hassle for me, good for the planet. (I have nothing against junk mail, as I used to make a living writing it, but it's wasteful if I'm sure I will never buy the products.)

* Registered Call: Allows people to record copies of telemarketer and business calls and store those calls as computer files. The person who founded the company was the only one in the book whose story was a near-tragedy rather than a minor annoyance. His girlfriend broke her neck while vacationing in Namibia, and her health insurer kept him on the phone for an hour without coming close to resolving the billing issues. His calling card ran out of minutes, he called back, and they had no record of the call . . . so he had to start all over again.

* The idea of using the Spanish-language operator (who evidently always speaks English) when the wait for the English-speaking operator is too long. I haven't tried it, but it's an interesting idea. Apparently you just apologize and say, "I couldn't get through on the other line."

However, many of the tactics described seem ineffective, pointless, or even downright cruel. Why call up a volunteer during a public-TV pledge drive and harass that person? If you don't like pledge drives, then either donate so they don't have to do the beg-a-thon or STOP WATCHING PUBLIC TELEVISION. Sheesh.

I don't like dealing with thoughtless, rude, or incompetent people, of course, but some of the suggestions in this book could get me screamed at. Or worse. Listen, I live near Chicago, and we are apparently about to lose our handgun ban. I don't know about you, but I can't be too careful.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

Bringing to the Meetup Tuesday night at 7 at Café Mozart. If there are no takers for this book, I will leave it in a front window or on the shelf that's by the stirrers and the napkins, opposite the register.

This one looked interesting, so I'll let you know.

Mostly amusing, but I can't work up a whole lot of sympathy with people who are annoyed because the bank is so efficient that they lose the opportunity to kite checks!

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

From one meet-up to another!

I snared this one from mojosmom at the mini-meet. (Great to see you again!)

The book seemed appropriate, as I'd had to drive through some mind-bendingly awful traffic (even by Boston standards, which is saying something) just to get there, so I had some very recent experience of life's not-so-little annoyances. (I'm not a vengeful type myself - takes too much energy - but it can be fun to imagine certain kinds of retribution. And I suspect I can find a really good release spot for this one after I've read it - perhaps near the waiting lines at the DMV? {grin})

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, although my very first page-marker was on the page describing the author's booby-trap for an ice-cream thief. The author refers to that, and to most of the other items in this book, as being passive-aggressive, but most of the items here do not fit that term as I understand it! But I enjoyed the salted-ice-cream story, and appreciated that its result - a very angry email from the victim, demonstrating clearly that even the wittiest, mildest retort to a rude action is quite likely to generate ire rather than an apology. With the reader's expectations set suitably low, the rest of the book can be seen as mildly interesting, but not necessarily safe!

My favorite bits were generally the ones where the aggrieved party did not take action against the offenders at all, but found a way to cope - Honku, for example, the creation of haiku based on vehicular rudeness. And then there's the Delocator, a web site that was set up by a woman who was frustrated at the prevalence of Starbucks and wanted a way to help people find non-Starbucks coffee shops. [I gave it a try but its data doesn't seem complete for my area, and the interface was a bit iffy. Love the idea, though!]

One item that I was delighted to see: the one about motivational posters. I recognized the person in that article immediately, as I'm a huge fan of the web site that he created to counteract those pretty-scenery/pat-phrases posters: the wonderful Despair, Inc..

Some of the smaller solutions struck me as very useful, such as the Cell Phone Prison, an insulated cooler in which workers could park the ringing cell phones of co-workers who'd left the phones behind. I had an experience with that in my last job, and this would have been a great way to deal with it. [Also much easier on the phone-owners than pitching the things out the nearest window!]

There were some items that struck me as way too mean-spirited, and some that were outright criminal, but for the most part I enjoyed the inventiveness and empathized with the frustration. Interesting book!

[See the author's web site here for samples of the book's contents.]

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I plan to leave this book among the other traveling books in the window of Coffee Labs at around 4 this afternoon. Hope the finder enjoys it!

I recently visited family in Sleepy Hollow, and on one rare quiet afternoon, I stopped at Coffee Labs on Main Street in Tarrytown. I picked up this book and read it on the plane en route to Beijing, China. I have gone as far as I wish to with it (didn't finish - I was getting too cynical!) so on the next book swap here, which will be on the first Saturday of November, I will pass it on. We'll see how far this goes.

CAUGHT IN TARRYTOWN NY USA

This came to us via our Beijing Book Swap and Board Games event! We were very excited because this is our first Bookcrossing book!

CAUGHT IN BEIJING BEIJING CHINA