Foxes in the supermarket and Complaint letters

Having a good whinge!

from The eloquent page by Caitlin Prescott

One of the things I love about zines is that they are a perfect platform to get those irritations of modern life off your chest! This also means they deal with subjects rarely documented anywhere else and give a voice to people who would otherwise remain totally unrepresented in the published record of Australian life. Two examples of this have been on my desk recently; Foxes in the supermarket and Complaint letters

Complaint letters and Foxes in the supermarket

Foxes in the supermarket actually contains two works by different authors published back to back on inverted pages. Written by Aaron Matthews and Beck Vinci the works are anecdotal descriptions of the frustrations and annoyances suffered by people working in Supermarkets. I was really drawn to this zine as my sister works in a supermarket and based on her stories and those in the zine it is obvious that the experience of dealing with the public, while sometimes a delight, has some universal pitfalls!
Complaint letters, written by Smells Like Zines Distro is a collection of letters of complaint  and the responses generated by the letters. It demonstrates how difficult it is to get a genuine personal response or resoulution to a problem you have with a large company and how the official line for dealing with complaints when applied to all situations can result in the ridiculous.
These zines inspire me to think about writing my own zine about things that annoy me. For instance, I have long felt that it is a low act to have only 11 Tim Tams per packet. You either have to have exactly 11 people to share the packet or there will be fights! Is this a cunning ploy to get us to buy two packets?