The trouble with neighbours

any way, good luck. its a horrible feeling i know.

Argh, friend (male) phoned this morning in sleep-deprived panic attack cz the guy in the flat above was being noisy all night and at 6am woke him up by pounding on his door. When friend answered, dude was stark naked in communal hall, pushed past him into his flat, and ran round looking in all the rooms shouting about his guests hiding from him.

Is there anything you can do about that except hope the guy (who's been mostly an OK neighbour but rowdy at night a lot lately) is embarrassed and calms down? Naked dude rents and the flats have a management company, so that's two people who could be complained to, but I don't know if that would achieve anything except possibly escalating nastiness.

nah get him turfed out, pronto.

yeah I mean you could have him arrested for that, let alone turfed out of the flat.

we have a phrase in my country to describe incidents such as this: "ah now that's no way to be carrying on"

"STEADY ON, NOW"

"ah for jaysus sake"

Last night my downstairs neighbour threatened to kill me. He wasn't joking and is a decidedly unsalubrious character, with what I guess to be some kind of drug problem (mebbe coke as there's no heroin-type sickly smell). I probably shouldn't have sung along to my Richard Youngs' CDs for quite so long that afternoon... :-(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh4DstK2w_Q

I had a neighbour go after a friend of mine with a hammer once. Like, chased him back into our flat trying to hit him in the head. Turns out someoen *else* had been revving/idling their car engine right outside this guys window for ages, and my awful timing, P went to get into his car to leave, angry man comes out, sees P in his car and jumps to wrong conclusion and starts chasing him.

We complained to the apartment managers, and ended up having to APOLOGISE TO THE GUY, because he was a fucking shift worker. As if I had any idea? I should have just called the police. I was only 17 or 18 at the time, it scared the shit out of me.

so we got new neighbours. three times in a week the cops have been outside the house, twice looking for her ex in my back garden and this morning investigating the fire that burnt the house to the ground, which was started at both the front and back doors.

i have no idea who my neighbours are. I have never seen them and have only heard them unlocking and going into the doors to their flat(s) (there are two other flats on my floor and i don't know which one(s) i've heard them going into as they are both quite far away down the hall from mine). I never hear any noise coming through the walls when they're in the flat. I don't know if they're extraordinarely quiet or if the walls are really thick. I have never heard noise from either above or below me and through the walls that are adjacent to the flats on the next close I have also never heard anything. It's weird.

i just tried to post something but my internet ate it. it was about homeowners who get all stinkeyed when other people park legally in front of their house, even though the street is public property. this happened to my bf and me this morning -- not in my neighborhood, but somewhere nearby where we've never had any parking trouble before.

like, what was this woman afraid of? her property value going down? a rabid attack by two bleary-eyed thirtysomething hipsters who haven't had coffee yet? that i would trample a very small patch of her meticulously watered and mowed lawn, which she shouldn't even have since we're in a goddamned drought?

Did she come out and yell at you or something? Who does that?

she was just very obviously glaring at us. we parked across the street instead and she was still glaring. people like that are why homeowners' associations have a bad reputation.

It's my experience that although you can always move, and always hope for better neighbors next time, invariably there is some new horror to be discovered. Through the years I've suffered through having neighbors who are either loud with their music past reasonable hours, who have made loud love with the bed banging against our shared wall, and who have whistled incessantly while walking up and down the staircase that was just beyond a door to my bedroom.

Currently my lateral neighbors are fine. I even get along with them rather well. The problem now, however, is the upstairs neighbor, who has what seems like a pack of dogs living in his apartment who like toys that bang on their hard wood floors, and the downstairs neighbor, whose cigarette smoke comes up through the radiator and into the room of my soon to be newborn son.

The next step for me is to move out of the city entirely and get a house, though I am wary of what other kinds of horrors lurk when the scenario changes.

i once had a ticket officer call me to tell me i wasn't supposed to park in front of some assholes house. i had a permit for what turned out to be a different part of the road so when they called and complained instead of giving me a ticket he got my # and rang me to ask me to move my civic.
i guess now it doesn't sounds so weird but at the time it was sort of surreal.

xpost

Smoke coming up through a radiator sounds a bit wrong, is there not something you can do about that? I mean you can hardly fault a man for smoking in his own home but you dont want that near baby obv.

um, so darraghmac - your neighbour's house is now burnt down?!

yes, that's pretty much where we're at with that.

Trayce, I've done a smidgeon of research on it and it looks like it could go either way in terms of the law. I recognize the right of the guy to do what he wants in his apartment (it's a coop), but when it starts to effect someone else, I think the situation might change.

If it keeps happening I'm going to raise the issue to (in order, depending if anything gets done about it) the super, the building management, and finally my lawyer. As it is I have stuffed the space around the radiator with old towels. We'll see if that works.

darragh: yeah I was going to say something... do you assume its this poor woman's ex? Sounds like she moved to get away from him and... ugh. No one was hurt I hope?

nobody hurt, though if she'd been home she wouldn't have had much chance. from what i could glean from the landlord this morning yeah it's exactly that- she's moved to get away from him, even though they've been separated for a while.

Jesus. Does she even know the place is gone yet, has she been back home? I always live in fear of coming home to a detroyed house.

i don't know- she only moved in about a week ago, i've never met her. i think she's probably made herself scarce since wednesday night, which was the last time he was seen hanging around.

Hope they catch the fucker. Ugh thats horrible.

catching him vs proving it was him. strong circumstantial evidence, certainly.

I came to post something but now I want to know the end of darraghmac's story -- mine is abt disagreement about how to resurface a path shared between several blocks and how the person involved who put in least effort to attend meetings or make their opinions known early or clearly is now very belatesly being a d!ck when the work has started, i.e. mildly tiresome stuff involving no shouting, at worst a testy exchange of emails between ppl who otherwise needn't ever interact

ok the situation has evolved a bit -- turns out the uninvolved person has been having quietly to wrangle a difficult slightly frightened old lady who demands everything to be as it always was -- not always an option when you're refashioning something used by many people, and when the crumbling and decaying aspect is the aspect everyone else wants tackled

the builder running the project did a fairly stellar job trying to calm her fears and talk her round but i suspect she will go back into her flat and alarm herself again, and keep her foot put down

i think the beef has been resolved since builders have carried on as they began (ie not dug up the section they laid down yesterday, as was being demanded)

i ended up doing a dull day's work on not enough sleep (it all blew up last night in email, and i worry even when it's not me going to be shouted at) but the completed section of path looks nice from here -- sadly the one cat who looked as if he was going to walk right across it per tradition sniffed at it gingerly and walked round on the flowerbeds

where is darraghmac, i need closure

She never came back, we moved away.

I realise this isnt great closure.

Id Google house fires in my home town but no thanks tbh

fair enough

Every now and then, the upstairs flat throw their cigs out of their window and into our garden. This can irritate the fuck out of me.

it probably irritates the dogs too

er, ha, i read that as "dogs" and not "cigs"

the resident most noisily active to get the paths resurfaced in the fierst place -- she is late middle age, quite unsteady on pins and (i suspect) has aspergers-related balance issues -- is now very vocally cross that halfway through the process the dug-up path is much worse than the path as it used to be (it will be finished in a week)

just heard her say loudly "i can't believe it" (my flat overlooks part of the path)

(i.e. this too will pass:, she is not the worst by any means and i feel for her plight, not being able to balance is p awful: i just sometimes wish "grit yr teeth and soldier on" wd occur to ppl dealing with short-lived processes THEY INITIATED, she is an intelligent person if a bit obsessive)

A bit unbalanced you might say? Sorry.

~post for "posts you didn't even for a second consider posting g to the "posts you had second thought about" thread~

lol it is all kicking off, the block that made least effort to contribute to the process and most fuss about the costs now HAAATE the result and are all angrily piling in proposing extremely expensive cosmetic changes which none of the other blocks want or will agree to

moral: (a) make yr block director turn up to meetings and represent you, (b) if you want it done a different way, do the research and legwork!

also a person and a cat have has already walked in the wet cement

I always think its a tragedy when municipal cement doesn't have graffiti or footprints in it

He's a leather worker and does it in his house right next to ours and doesn't give a fuck what time it is or that he's next door to a dying woman

Now I don't have to be nice because fuck it who gives a fuck my wife is dead I don't have to try not to get kicked out by the landlord

we have a bro infestation in our building now

I probably shouldn't post on ilx when I'm drunk, he says after mostly posting on ilx when he's drunk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdZRN1bs200&feature=youtu.be

15 days later and it is still beeping!

essential 5 second youtube vid of beeping Co2 alarm

Reminds me a the 2000s prank gadget the Annoy-a-Tron, versions of which seem to still be available on etsy. They are probably easier to hide than a full-fledged CO2 alarm, but excellent work calzino for your inventiveness in this situation.

https://www.etsy.com/search?q=annoy%20a%20tron

from the youtube demos I've seen of them I don't think they'd survive the days of torrential rainfall the seemingly indestructible built-by-SkyNet Co2 alarm has!

I can't even remember if Co2 alarms are supposed to have an IP rating in UK safety regs, but this one would get a high number for sure.

last year for the 4th of July, my good friend P@m warned me about her neighbors. So I go to park, and where she lives there's nothing but street parking really, but there's like one space left when I get there. all of a sudden, I'm parking and I see this obnoxious sign on a stick next to a LEGAL parking space that says NO PARKING - I PAID FOR A LAKESIDE VIEW, NOT A CARSIDE VIEW.

nonetheless, I ignored it and left my car there.

was it a true lake or an orlando puddle lake?

oh compleeeetely the latter

we have glorified retention ponds

lol i moved from volcanic new zealand to orlando and was dismayed by the lake designation standards

One of my ILX neighbors keeps telling the same story.

not my neighbors, but I went to a house party on the Fourth of July in a tucked away lakeside community. I knew the friend's neighbors would be trouble when parking my car. there was a custom, illegally made No Parking sign in front of legitimate, community approved parking spaces because parking there would block the lakeside view, and the sign said "We paid for a LAKE view, not a CAR view". I deliberately parked in front of the sign as it was the only space left and my alternative was parking in the next legal spot two blocks away which..nope.

so keep in mind this is July 4th and it's not even particularly late, and our friends are setting off some mild fireworks, and once again, passive aggressive neighbor who is sitting outside with her husband walks by and mentions "shame you all have to do fireworks, my husband doesn't like it", and walks away before anybody can reply, then asshole husband starts screaming "knock it off" even though it's literally a holiday where fireworks go off and there's no reason for them to be sitting outside otherwise, because it's dark and mosquito-y.

we stopped because we were tired of their shit (I honestly don't care for fireworks anyway so I didn't care).

― ill fuckin put a paste on those (Neanderthal), Saturday, February 8, 2020 9:11 AM

the weirdest fucking thing about that is even that post wasn't from when it happened, but many months after, and I have no recollection of writing it.

jesus even used the same fuckin' wording!!!

the other fucked thing is there have been quite a few times where I've randomly written something on FB and then gone on Memories and see I wrote the same thing like 8 years ago on the same date

I've done it once or twice myself.

oh dear lads