Methods for Maddening™:

7 habits of highly annoying people

Volume 2: Intermediate Infuriation

            Method 3:

            Legally change your name often.  Every six months, get a new name and a new identity.  This method has an added advantage of making you impossible to track down, because you will already have a new alias and persona by the time a victim of the Methods™ that you practice tries to find you.

            When choosing a new name, make sure to pick something that is difficult to pronounce, difficult to spell, impossible either to pronounce or to spell, or impossible to write.  Take, for example, Prince while he couldn’t use his own name.  First he was Prince, then The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, then that weird symbol.  Now that the contract that he was stupid enough to sign has expired, he is Prince again.  If you want to really exasperate someone, use your address as your name.  Mr. 23 North 3^rd Street has an interesting ring to it.  Again, the only limit is your imagination.

            You should make frequent dinner reservations under a bizarre name.  Nothing annoys a maitre d’ more than having to say something like “Seventeen and a half, party of two.”  The confused stares from other patrons add to the effect.

            Take standardized tests under your new name.  Confound the proctors when you tell them that you can’t bubble your name in because it does not consist of English letters and cannot be transliterated because it is a symbol.

Method 4:

            Organize, organize, and organize.  You cannot plan enough.  This is an extension of the classic college prank of ordering a pizza to be delivered to someone else’s room.  We have made some refinements, however.  Bewilder and annoy hundreds by sending out invitations to a pizza party at the house of an unsuspecting victim.  Order them a large quantity of pizza, but only unappetizing ones, like sauerkraut and feta cheese or perhaps anchovy and garlic.  The hungry throng will be angry at the ‘host,’ who won’t know what hit him.

            Plan a flash mob.  For those of you still using a manual typewriter and a rotary telephone, a flash mob is a large number of people who have arranged over the internet to do something odd in a specific location and at a specific time.  For example, arrange to have hundreds of people spontaneously congregate in a shoe store and protest their treatment of ‘the poor soles.’

            Plan a block party.  Invite each person on your street to bring a potluck item to a different location in the neighborhood.  Give each neighbor a different idea of what the party will be like: tell some that it is a costume party, others that it is formal, others that they should bring one thing and some that everything will be provided.  Inform everyone anonymously, because if your entire neighborhood is angry at you, house hunting is in your future.

            So concludes Volume 2 in the Methods for Maddening™ series.  You should now be ready for Volume 3: Advanced Annoying.  Thank you for continuing with the course: you will be unbearable in no time!