Sunday, May 30, 2010

Revenge of the angry neighbours

I live in a stairwell where there are 8 apartments. On the top floor there are 3 single women, all in their 50's and 60's. One has mental problems and talks loudly in a shrill voice but is a very sweet person. The second woman likes to renovate at night, something which drives Nick crazy, because she lives right above us. He has pounded on the ceiling to make her stop and left a note in her mail slot once, and both times the noise has stopped. On the middle floor is us on the right, a retired couple right next to us, and a couple in their late 50's who have a very large dog who likes to bark at all the other dogs in the neighbourhood. On the bottom floor, on the right side directly below us, lives a couple of young, quiet sisters who never make their presence known.

To the left lives a young couple, and the girl is making her neighbour's lives a nightmare on the weekends. They moved in in March, and the moment I saw the girl I knew right away just by looking at her what we were all in for. I was right. There are wild parties almost every weekend, Friday and Saturday. For some reason the boyfriend goes out of town for the weekend a lot, and when the cat's away, the mice will play.
This weekend they amused themselves with throwing their empty beer bottles on the lawn outside, as well as hurling them across the garage over at the parking lot, where the are plenty of cars that they might have hit. Thankfully they didn't hit our car. I say thankfully because Nick reacts with an unbelievable fury when it comes to his car, and he would probably have gone down there and hit someone, which would have only have gotten him in trouble. Anyway, the damn bottles are still laying around. She hasn't bothered to clean them up. We had to go out to the parking lot and clean up the glass shards that were laying around after they had their little bottle hurling contest, to avoid the dogs stepping on the glass and cutting up their paws.

You may well ask why nobody asked the skank herself to clean up her own mess. Well you see, there are certain people in this world that there is no point in confronting, because things will only get worse. Had we gone down there and asked her to please clean up her crap, the outcome would probably have been something like this:
We: "Please go out there and take care of your garbage"
Her: "Fuck off!"
Then the next thing that may have happened was that I would have taken one of the bottles and shoved it up her ass. It probably wouldn't have worked though, but I might have tried, or at least wanted to.

Anyway, this morning when I came back from my morning walk with Kelly, one of my neighbours came down the stairs and starts talking about the noise last night. This is the neighbour who lives right across from me, and thus he lives directly below these party animals. They were apparently up all night, unable to sleep due to the noise and the cigarette smoke that came up into their apartment, since 15 people had been standing out on the balcony downstairs puffing away.
My neighbour and I discussed the situation for a while and then comes the old retiree who lives next to me, and the first thing out of his mouth is "They have to go!" He was of course referring to the couple downstairs. They had also had a sleepless night, since they live above them as well. All three of us agreed that we should all complain repeatedly, and sooner or later they're bound to get evicted.

Nick and I discussed it over breakfast and suddenly we came up with a brilliant idea. We should all of us, all the other neighbours who are considerate towards each other, gang up and create a noise fest one night. We were laughing like hyenas as we were concocting the perfect plan.

Ok, here it goes. Picture it now, a dark stairwell, it's 6:00am on a Saturday morning, it's quiet, everybody is seemingly asleep. The losers downstairs have finally gone to bed after a whole night's loud partying, which kept their neighbours up of course. Everything is quiet. They're sleeping, the troubled sleep of the hammered, who know that they will wake up in 6-7 hours with a severe hangover.
This is when the fun really begins.
First, the retired couple on the middle floor suddenly breaks out into a very loud polka session with about 10 of their fellow buddies. They are all wearing clogs and are clapping and cheering and having a blast. Sweet sounds of a hearty accordion echoes through the stairwell.
Then, the middle-aged couple begins talking on their balcony. This may sound fairly harmless but it must be pointed out that the wife has one of those voices that can bend steel. Meanwhile, their large dog is tied up on the grass outside, right outside the balcony of the loud couple, and he's barking incessantly.
Then all of a sudden the women upstairs who has a mental disorder begins dropping marbles every 1 or 2 minutes from the top floor. They drop onto to the stone floor downstairs with a loud clatter. Incidentally, they land right in front of the loser's door.
Suddenly loud new wave music blares out from the other apartment downstairs. The two quiet girls may look harmless but they suddenly reveal themselves to be raging new age hippies with a distinct taste for that type of music.
The woman on the top floor who likes to renovate in the middle of the night suddenly begins drilling with a concrete drill. The noise pierces through the entire stairwell.
Meanwhile, the other woman on the top floor, who walks with a crutch, takes her garbage out, and somehow drags her crutch against the railing as she walks, something which always creates a very loud, echoing sound that one can hear very well inside the apartments.
In our apartment, Nick has finally received my blessing to play his most annoying techno music as loudly has he wants. Hence, the base is so loud that our furniture is almost hopping around on the floor.

The losers downstairs, who naturally awoke from their drunken slumber, opens their door and stick their heads out into the hallway and wonders what the hell is going on.
"Why, we're just having some fun, same as you are every weekend!" We all answer, with a cheerful smile.

Hey, we can dream can't we? You see, the truth is that just normal anger doesn't really do any good in these situations. If you confront people like the loud girl as a rational human being, all you're going to get is an argument. But, if you bring on the insanity, it is much more effective. Anger won't scare people off, but insanity will. If you see someone out on the street who is alone and is laughing hysterically for no apparent reason, you're going to avoid that person. Irrational behaviour is much more scary than just plain anger. So I say, don't retaliate with anger, respond with madness.

3 comments:

canadianne said...

it was probably pointless to have gone and talked to the idiots...so it's good you're taking it to management

you know the two quiet sisters may not be sisters at all..maybe one of them is a certain elusive friend of mine and the other is her mother..

to think, all the while she's been hiding in your building..
that would explain her disappearance!

Linda said...

Which friend would that be? The one I think it is?

canadianne said...

yes, the original, the one and only, Clam