Throughout the majority of our childhood my brother and I completely got along, but for about a year when I was fourteen and he was eleven every little thing we did annoyed each other.

We were very passive about it. It's not like we got into screaming fights or slammed doors on each other or anything. Mainly we just stopped talking to each other and I, at least, began complaining about him and describing all his stupid quirks to my friends. Whatever he was doing at the time that bugged me must have been pretty small potatoes, however, seeing as how the only specific example I remember now was the week when I started trying to get up earlier than usual so I could have time to eat breakfast and not be rushed getting ready for school (as opposed to running really late and having to put my contacts in in the car). Of course he started getting up early too, and he kept making lots of noise and disturbing my parents until they thundered down that we were all to remain in bed until Mom came to wake us up. Which seemed very unfair to me at the time, as the whole thing was his fault.

But even then we never confronted each other. The only outward manifestation of our irritation with each other was a series of messages we left for each other on a white board that hung over the desk where we did our homework.

It started innocently enough. I think it was actually one of our sisters who had drawn a stick figure man on the board in the first place. Regardless, an hour or two later one of us (and I really don't remember which) had drawn a 10-ton weight falling onto the man and helpfully added an arrow pointing to the man with a label whose effectiveness came from its direct simplicity: You.

To which the other one of us responded by replacing the 10-ton weight with a 100-ton one and enlarging the label slightly: YOU.

The only proper riposte to that was to change the 100-weight to a large foot, which then metamorphised into, among other things, a car driving merrily off of a cliff, an airplane being shaken by Godzilla, and a house sinking into a bog, the only constant feature of these vignettes being the presence of the stick figure, its head peeping fearfully out of each vehicle of disaster, accompanied by the ever-present arrow and label--you--just in case the other person had a lapse in memory and forgot the purpose of this exercise.

Anything went, so long as each new drawing kept some lines from the previous one. Things continued like this for a couple weeks, us exchanging two or three pictures a day. It was like Fight Club: the first rule was that we never talked about it. The second rule was that we never drew new pictures if other people were in the room, so that portion of the process alone entailed an entertaining amount of subterfuge.

Eventually we ran out of steam and stopped playing. My guess is that by that point we weren't mad at each other anymore. How could we be, when we had just made up such an incredible game without even having to speak to each other?

I would suggest that if you are ever ticked at a co-worker that you should go draw a stick man in slight danger on his/her white board and then see what happens next. If they haven't the brains to build upon what you've given them, then at least you now know they aren't worth dealing with as an equal, and you can just move on without them.

My brother and I finally brought up our white board pictures a year or two ago, and even then the conversation didn't consist of much more than:

"Remember when we drew those pictures?"

"Yeah. Heh heh."

"And we never even talked about it."

"Nope."

"Heh."