Complaints might be thought a priori to be a good place to find paralinguistic features in their natural setting. Using conversation analytic methodology, I argue that an account of the phonetics of complaints needs to take into consideration other sequential features of the turn in which the complaint is delivered. In particular, a turn delivering a complaint can either be marked as designed to receive an affiliative reponse (and thus a continuation of the activity of complaining), or marked as closing down the complaint sequence.