I’m a college student. I don’t have a car and instead use a combination of a bicycle and public transportation. My route to school involves riding my bicycle to the nearest light rail station, locking up the bike at one of the racks there, and taking the train to school. This station’s not necessarily in a fantastic part of town, and even if it was, I wouldn’t be particularly excited about leaving my main mode of transportation there unprotected for most of a day, several days a week.

Thankfully, the public transportation people rent out bike lockers at many of the train stations, and I quickly decided that I wanted one. So about a month before the semester started, I called the company and got an answering machine.

Okay, no problem, I’ll leave a message. Did that, never got a call back. Called again two days later, left another message. Didn’t get a call back. So I quickly fell into a pattern of calling every couple of days, not even having my stuff out to pay for a locker because I knew the guy wouldn’t pick up.

School starts, I still don’t have a locker. So I just lock up my bike at the bike rack every day and pray, basically. About half the semester goes by with no problems, and by now I’m only calling every week or so. Then one day I come to my bike and someone’s mucked with the brakes. Nothing so damaged I couldn’t ride it home to fix it, but it’s pretty clear that someone started to try and take the back wheel and either got interrupted or lost interest. I redouble my efforts and return to calling the guy every couple days.

(For those of you who are curious, I had also called the company’s main line several times in case the number on the site was out of date. They redirected me to the same number every time.)

Eventually, my mom calls bullshit on this whole situation and files a formal complaint to the company. The next day, I get a call from them, asking politely if I’m the person who called the other day about a bike locker, carefully avoiding acknowledging that I’ve called dozens and dozens of times now. I respond yes, and get a bunch of stuff sorted out, let the guy gather all the necessary paperwork, and then sweetly tell him that unfortunately, I’m really busy at the moment and just can’t set up a time to meet right now, and I’ll call him back.

This was very satisfying to me for a couple of days, but then it quickly became clear that all I had done was start the whole cycle over again, and it was another four months before I finally got the locker, during which time my seat got stolen in a torrential rainstorm.

Moral of the story: only be passive aggressive when it’s actually to your advantage.