Aarghh Is Where Your Daily Rage Goes

The printer has jammed. You open the little door, remove a scrap of paper and close it again. The printer says there is still a jam. At this point, one of you is lying, and the printer has a screen on which to make its case.

You could tell the family WhatsApp group. But your sister is at work, your dad will ask whether you’ve tried switching it off, and an aunt will respond six hours later with a picture of a rose.

There’s another option: Aarghh.com, a website with a box for whatever is getting on your nerves. The idea is to type out your daily rage, let it disappear and get on with your day. Your family can go back to arguing about who has the good Tupperware.

Finally, a website that understands the size of the problem

The homepage asks what’s bothering you today. Around the text box are little grievances about a printer with impeccable timing, a dog with early-morning opinions and an order that appears to consist entirely of onions. There’s a fire emoji beside the slider. You get the idea before you’ve typed a word.

Say you’ve just got home after a crawl on the N1, only to discover the milk carton in the fridge contains roughly enough milk to whiten a teaspoon. That’s the sort of complaint that feels urgent for about ninety seconds. It doesn’t need a family meeting. It may, however, need a full sentence with an unreasonable number of capital letters.

Aarghh gives that sentence somewhere to go. The milk situation remains unresolved. The person who left the carton in the fridge gets to finish their evening in peace.

The internet could use a few more exits

Much of the internet makes it easy to turn a passing irritation into an ongoing commitment. You post about someone abandoning a trolley in a parking bay. By supper, strangers are debating whether you should have parked somewhere else. By bedtime, somebody has brought up the decline of Western civilisation. The trolley, meanwhile, has been collected.

Aarghh’s premise is funny because it reverses that arrangement. The point is for the rant to go away. There’s no audience you have to entertain and no argument you need to win. You can write the extremely unfair sentence about the trolley, recognise that it’s extremely unfair, and leave it there.

That’s also the distinction worth keeping in mind about “disappears forever”: it describes the experience the site is going for. A rant vanishing from the page doesn’t tell you what happens behind the scenes. The trolley will make a perfectly good subject without anyone’s name or number plate.

A first draft you don’t have to send

Consider a fictional agency on a Friday afternoon. A client sends a note asking whether the team could make the campaign feel more spontaneous. Attached is a spreadsheet specifying exactly how spontaneous each piece should be.

The account manager’s first response, if she were to type it unfiltered, might be a short but forceful essay on the nature of spontaneity. Her second might be a useful question: does the client want looser wording, less polished photography or room to react to what happens on the day?

The first draft can go to Aarghh. The second can go to the person who can answer it. By Monday, they might even have a better campaign. For another case of an apparently simple request turning into a proper conversation, read the quick client change that became a teamwork lesson.

Some frustrations do need a conversation. The site’s appeal is in giving you somewhere to put the opening remarks while you work out what you actually want to say.

A small idea that knows when it’s done

The clever bit is how little the site asks of you. Its name sounds like what you came there to say. The text box is right there. The fire emoji does more to explain the point than three screens of onboarding ever could.

For anyone making something for the web, that’s a lovely bit of restraint. Think about the moment somebody arrives and the moment they’re ready to leave. What do they need in between? Aarghh’s answer is a place to type and a way to let go. It would be a much worse idea if it sent you a monthly report on your top five grievances.

Aarghh is sponsored by CreH8ive. If you like small ideas that make you look differently at an ordinary day, sign up for The CreH8ive Times.

As for the printer, it’s working now. Somebody walked over and pressed the same button you pressed four times. That’s tomorrow’s entry sorted.