Okay, I’ve got a message to everyone who said that my last video was annoying because I spent
the whole time rambling about my mysterious rash and then just started playing the national anthem
on repeat: got you, losers. That was a CIA psy-op. I took that right out of section 11,
subsection A2 of the CIA manual on how to be annoying. And yes, that’s right:
the CIA has a manual on how to be annoying. Now, before we dig into the juicy contents
of this book, we need to answer a kind of glaring question: why is the CIA spending
money on a book about how to be annoying when they could be spending money on something reasonable,
like rigging a beautiful sea shell with explosives and planting it in the ocean near Cuba on the off
chance that their prime minister picks it up to admire it but instead gets blown up? Well,
to answer that question, we need a little bit of historical context. The book in question
is called “The Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” and it was published by the CIA’s precursor,
the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II. This book was not intended for Americans,
who had already mastered the art of being annoying several decades earlier—it was written
for distribution in Nazi-occupied European countries, like France, Norway, and Belgium.
You see, when the Nazis took over these countries, they didn’t just occupy their governments; they
also took control of their telephone lines, their factories, their movie theaters, everything. And
given that they couldn’t just put German soldiers in charge of every French or Norwegian business,
they had to rely on the citizens of these occupied countries to keep everything moving smoothly in
their quickly-expanding empire… which didn’t always work out, because Nazi invasions tended
to turn some people off of Nazism. A lot of civilians took it upon themselves to fight,
protest, or just cause chaos—car factories across France, for example, started churning
out bizarrely high rates of defective vehicles as soon as the Nazis took over. Now, the US saw this
and said “that’s pretty impressive, but there’s no one better at making cars that don’t work than
us,” so they had the OSS assemble a manual to teach citizens of these countries how to subtly
make their societies worse and less productive; as it states in its introduction, this form of
sabotage is “based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative
attitude, and to encourage others to do the same.” This book is basically broken up into eleven
sections, each corresponding to a different profession and a different thing that can be
interrupted, destroyed, or just slowed down by an army of annoying civilians.
The first section is pretty vague, and concerns anyone who… works in a building. The OSS suggests
forgetting to restock on toilet paper, and then after you’ve humiliated your coworkers,
it details seven different ways to burn your building down. So… that's how to be
annoying if you work in a building, I guess. The next three sections are fairly long, but
also pretty important; they detail how to be bad at your job if you work at a factory. Some of the
advice is pretty subtle, stuff like letting your cutting tools get dull to slow down production,
storing saws at an angle that will get them to break, and applying too much heat to tempered
steel to make it weaker. Other suggestions are a little bolder, like the OSS’ wise
observation that peeing into an engine will probably break it, and then there are like,
five more ways to start fires, in case the whole section on burning buildings down didn’t grab you.
Next we have the book’s section for farmers, which is just a couple of sentences that basically
amount to “be bad at farming,” so we’ll quickly move ahead to the bits about transportation.
This is where the OSS gets truly petty, and starts suggesting things that don’t really
do anything other than randomly piss people off. Stuff like “issue two tickets for the same seat
in the train,” “see that the food is especially bad,” and wake everyone up by “handling baggage
as noisily as possible during the night.” It also provides some guidance for non-workers,
like giving people wrong directions and lying about random bridges being closed. Also some
more ways to start fires. Obviously. Next up is communications networks,
which as my comments section has proven, are ideal targets for unproductive members of society. Some
of these tips are directed at the people actually facilitating telephone or telegram networks,
with tips like replacing the word “minimum” with “miximum,” so no one knows whether it was supposed
to be “minimum” or “maximum.” For those who aren’t running communications networks but still have a
telephone and and a general distaste for fascism, the OSS suggests calling the Nazi headquarters,
waiting for them to pick up, saying, “oops, wrong number,” and then repeating this every single day
until they leave your country. This section also details how to ruin movies for everyone else,
with tips like clapping loudly, coughing, talking, and releasing two to three dozen large moths that
will fly into the projector beam and block the movie. I mean, we’ve all met that annoying guy
that sneaks two to three dozen large moths into every movie under his jacket, it’s the worst.
In section 11, concerning office work, the OSS recommends that you should “refer
all matters to committees for further study and consideration,” and that you should “attempt to
make the committees as large as possible.” You should also, “hold conferences when there is more
critical work to be done,” and then after those meetings, “refer back to matters decided upon
at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.”
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking—this is exactly what your workplace is like. Well,
the explanation for that is perfectly simple: someone at your office is a CIA asset hellbent
on destroying your country, and it is your responsibility to find them and take them out.
The book concludes with some simple, general guidelines for being an annoying, unproductive
person in any context. Now, some of these haven’t aged particularly well, like their suggestion to
“treat axis nationals coldly,” which is now less of an “annoying” thing and more of a “bare minimum
for living in society” thing. But some of these tips are truly timeless, like the ever-reliable
“cry and sob hysterically at every occasion,” and the wisest tip of all, “act stupid.”
One example of acting stupid would be, say, paying exorbitant prices for individual stock footage
clips instead of using our sponsor, StoryBlocks. If you watch my videos and have any interest
in making your own videos on YouTube, I can’t recommend StoryBlocks enough. I’ve been using
them since quite literally the start of my creator career, and they give you everything you need to
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a subscription to StoryBlocks also gets you access to their library of background music
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