Brianna Parkins: There is virtue to being an absolute pest

Being annoying is an overlooked skill or worse, a maligned quality. It is a shame, really, because annoying people are often the ones who get things done. Or achieve a win. Or draw attention to an issue.

Don’t confuse these people with your bog-standard melts. Those are the people who draw energy from getting negative reactions out of others because they don’t want to deal with their own feelings. These are easily spotted in the wild by their identifiable cry of “I’m just joking!” or “Snowflakes! after they’ve said or done something nasty.

But there is virtue to being an absolute pest when it is driven by purpose. Somewhere along the way, “being annoying” and “being persistent” had their lines blurred, often on purpose by institutions that would very much like not to deal with the consequences of their own actions or do the thing they said they would.

Being annoying can be an art form. Last month a hotel in Dublin found itself hosting an art protest against hotels in Dublin. Two artists, Eve Wood and Aoife Ward, copped that the “cultural space” promised by developers as a condition of the hotel’s approval hadn’t actually been opened for use yet. So they asked the hotel’s owners to use the empty, unfinished concrete room to host an exhibition, and Con:Temporary Quarters went ahead, drawing attention to the apparent gap between what gets promised and what actually gets built.

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Journalism is an entire industry that runs off annoying people, pestering others with questions they wouldn’t like to answer and chasing up things organisations would like to ignore. If you look closely at stories revealing abuse of power – the Tuam babies revelation, child abuse cover-ups, the FAI scandal – you’ll see they came about because journalists and their sources refused to be brushed off. The fingerprints of serial pests can be found on tribunals and investigations.

My dad’s reputation has spread and now people come from all over the land to seek his help with banks trying to shirk obligations, councils trying to remove public parks, inflated utility charges and immigration hassles

On an everyday level, these pests are the people writing letters to councils when roads haven’t been fixed. They are the friends who are excellent at writing emails quoting consumer law when their granny has been ripped off by a dodgy retailer. They are the refund-getters. They are the knowers of bylaws and policies and how they apply. They are lobbyists for local services. They are ones highlighting the shameful lack of support that families with additional needs children have in this country when the departments and services are trying to spin otherwise. They are the people who cannot be given the runaround. They’re on the front page of local papers pointing at potholes and polluted waterways. They have manilla folders bursting with printed-out correspondence. They are not to be messed with.

Some pests are born, others are made. For decades I have studied one up close, hoping to understand where his drive and motivation comes from. So far I have gleaned two observations:

1. My dad is very good at understanding complex rules, laws, rights and entitlements.

2. He dislikes people or organisations who, in his words, “try to bulls**t their way around them”.

His stubbornness coupled with a complete lack of embarrassment when he knows he’s in the right have been underestimated by public servants at their own peril. I’m sure the department of transport employee who denied my schoolbus pass on the basis that I lived inside the qualifying 3km thought my father would give up and move on when he got the letter.

[ Brianna Parkins: I made the mistake of pretending I liked rugby once. Now I’m trapped ]

What he couldn’t have known is my father would go on to walk the entire distance to and from school, twice, with a surveyor’s wheel, to prove that it was actually a longer distance due to a lack of pedestrian access. He walked along busy side roads with a bright red little trundle wheel, mostly only used in primary school maths class, unperturbed about who might see him and what they thought. He was pursuing justice with every click, and that’s all that mattered. He even went to the extreme of getting a “certificate of competence” issued in his name, certifying he was clicky-clacky number-wheel qualified, just in case there was any doubt about the accuracy of the results.

I almost felt sorry for that public servant, even though he had tried to rip off a student (me) in a disadvantaged area by making us pay for a €400 bus pass on a technicality. He did not know peace for three months as the letters went back and forth, until the department realised there was no loophole they could use, no exception they could reach for. The rules were the rules and my dad would just keep coming after them, a bureaucratic Terminator armed with a clickwheel.

His reputation has spread and now people come from all over the land to seek his help with banks trying to shirk obligations, councils trying to remove public parks, inflated utility charges and immigration hassles.

Sometimes I wonder if banks, governments and other powerful institutions know they have been put in their place by a man who types his emails with only two fingers. But that only makes his victories sweeter.