So, last Thursday was a snow day.  Yes, I still worked from home (a full day, I might add), but that doesn’t mean that the work day was one continuous stretch.  No, that’s the advantage of working from home: 2 hour breaks in the middle of it.  And when you get two NUHOCers together, with extra energy and an hour to kill… well, things get interesting.

For the last few weeks my roommate Rich and I had been entertained by a low-key war over a parking spot near our house.  In Boston, if you clear the snow from a spot you generally get the right to lay claim to it, usually by holding it with a traffic cone or a spare lawn chair.  Sometimes someone steals your spot.  It sucks, but short of keying their car there’s not much you can do about it.  Not much, except WRITING PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE NOTES!  Someone had seemingly stolen someone else’s spot, who then proceeded to start a war of words, in the note form, over who had the right to the spot.  This had gone on for a week or two, but now was the only time that Rich and I were hanging out with nothing better to do…

See, the last round of notes had focused on the idea that the person who put the most work into clearing the spot was, by rights, owner of said spot.  However, they had not taken the time to clear their spot out that morning.  By their own logic, anyone who took time to clean that spot could lay claim to it… logic that was perfectly sound to us.  So after drafting a quite excellent “old-timey” style note (complete with “dear sir and/or madam” and “Dictated, not read” at the end), we started clearing the spot.  Halfway through shoveling it down to the blacktop, a woman in a neck-brace came up to talk to us…

It turns out that her husband had initiated the note-war when someone had stolen her spot, a spot that he had cleared for her due to her injury.  She asked us what we were doing, wondering if we were her formerly-unknown opponent in the war of the notes.  We explained the situation in-depth, including our entertainment at their notes and our plan for the day, which she found rather hilarious.  For her, of course, this simply meant that she got to keep the spot, but didn’t have to clear it.  For us, we got some excersise, and a huge amount of entertainment.  We parted ways a bit afterwards, having learnt about one of the parties, and a good amount of neighborhood gossip at the same time.

Now, this would have been a fine ending to the story, right?  Right.  But how to make it better?  I get a text message later that night from Rich, while I was out at the climbing gym.  “Dude, did you see?!?” he wrote; “Umm… no?  What?  Huh?” was my reply, to which I got the perfectly cryptic “Don’t worry, you’ll see when you get home”.  I was hoping/expecting that the war had gone even further, with new and funnier notes.  I was sort of right; when I got home, there was a six pack of PBR Tall-Boys on the counter, with the following note attached:

NOTE HERE <– I’ll update this ASAP