Grrr…that’s most of Iowa. I’m in Iowa City at the moment, $354.25 won’t get you an efficiency. 
“Here Kewpie, Here Kewpie! Oh Kewpie, Oh Kewpie. OH KEWPIE! OH KEWPIE! KEWPIE-KEWPIE-KEWPIE! KEW… KEW… KEW… - UH, UH, UH…”
Above our apartment there lived two women; room-mates or perhaps sisters.
Nearly every night, or at odd hours of the day, we’d hear the unmistakable sound of the squeaking of bedsprings.
Sometimes, slowly…squeeekah…squeeekah…squeeekah
Sometimes, really fast… squee…squee…squee…squee…squee
and for LONG periods of time. Not uncommonly for a half-hour at a time. Followed by a rest-period of 10-15 minutes, and it starts again!
No moaning; no calling of names or terms of endearment.
Just the ceaseless SQUEAKING of the bed!
Jeez… either they’ve got GREAT stamina or the entire football team is up there!
One summer night, GrizzWife and I were walking to our building’s front door and we heard that same squeaking again. Our upstair’s neighbor’s window was open…
and so were the blinds…
and so were the curtains…
and we could see one of the women…
bathed in sweat and panting…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
…on a stairmaster.
and we LAAAAAAAAAUGHED!
:rolleyes:
Oh my. Please accept my profound apologies!
I lived for a couple of years in an apartment complex. One evening I was stepping out and there was a car parked right by the sidewalk…I had to walk right by it to get around it. There was a man seated in the drivers seat.
The lady who lived in the building across from me (separated by this sidewalk) was also in the front seat, I just didn’t see her since her head was in the guys lap.
When I walked by the car she freaked out and jumped, still in a mostly horizontal position, into the back seat.
I was looking her right in the face as she went over, and she was looking right at me.
If she had just kept her head down I’d never have seen her.
This is the series of noises that I heard repeated from a set of former upstairs neighbors.
mumble-mumble…
stomp stomp stomp
silence
mumble
stomp stomp stomp
silence
mumble-mumble
stomp stomp stomp
CRASH!!
laugh laugh laugh
Repeat over and over and over again.
The only thing I can imagine is that they were playing some marathon game of Twister.
I’ve got my own Pit thread on the subject.
All 3 could be labeled as pests though.
When I finally had enough money to afford a decent apartment I found what I thought to be a great place known as The Baldwin Garden Apts. No more shitty, damp basement apts. for me! No more dealing with no(i)sy landlords living 8’ over my subterranean head. I paid the realtor her 12% commission, comfortable in the fact I was taking a corporately managed, spacious, first floor unit from here on in.
A few days after I moved in, as I opened the door to my new digs humming the “Moving on Up” theme from The Jeffersons, I saw something I’d never seen before or since. We’re talking wrath of God type stuff here. Maybe my father was right about skipping confession all these years. I thought to myself, “am I such an evil sinner that I deserve to have a huge black swarm of flying insects so wide and so dense I can’t see to the other side of my living room?” I freaked. Here it is 8PM Sunday night and I had no idea how to handle the situation. Luckily, there was a Pathmark open a mile or so up Grand Ave. I sped up there and grabbed as many cans of insecticide that would fit in the cart. I had every type and brand imaginable: Raid flying insect killer, D-Con ant and roach spray and Bengal brand industrial strength aerosol. I paid the cashier the four hundred and some odd dollars she rang up and headed back home to do battle.
Upon arriving home, I sprinted from my parking spot to the front door, bagfuls of spray cans clanging as I plotted my battle plan. I stripped off my shirt and wrapped it over my face in the form of a makeshift air filter mask. I smeared mud all over my torso and arms that I thought would serve as both camouflage and sting prevention. I kicked open my front door, spray cans in hand, firing them off like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. The carnage lasted all of about 2 seconds. The instant the now larger swarm got a whiff of the poison, they stopped flying in midair and fell dead to the floor in unison…much in the same manner Wyle E. Coyote plummets down the Grand Canyon. Four Hoover bags later, I had the last of the enemy vacuumed off the floor.
Management contacted a “professional” exterminator the following day who counted even identify the genus or species of the pests. I opted to play it safe by caulking up every crack and crevice throughout the apartment. Ten tubes later, every possible entrance into my apartment was now blocked with a ¾” thick bead of clear silicone.
The caulk barrier held up for the four years I lived there. Every spring, I’d put my ear to the ground and look through the silicone that covered the gap between the wood floors and shoe moulding. I watched & jeered those aggravated & frustrated little buggers pacing back and forth behind my Phenoseal barricade, knowing they could no longer come up from the basement of another visit.
I’ll concede, even though manmade barriers are effective in keeping out flying perennial “whatever-they-ares”, they don’t work as well against cockroaches. Not that I’ve had numerous encounters with the breed, but the few I have had make my skin crawl. I’m the type who never cooked and the only food I kept was safely sealed behind either a refrigerator door or in a tin can. I’ve heard too many urban legends about them crawling in people’s ears while they’re asleep and the thought of a disease carrying, six-legged piece of vermin burrowing toward my brains is more creepy than I can put into words. The most memorable roach I ever came across was one I nicknamed Scout. This son-of-a-bitch was huge: almost the size of horse in need of a saddle…and cocky. I remember our first and only meeting like it was yesterday. It was a hot Wednesday night and I was watching The Howling, Part 4 on HBO. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shiny, brown and very imposing object make its way from the kitchen into the living room. This bastard wasn’t cautiously darting into new environs like his much smaller cousins would - he was strutting. “Holy shit!” I yelled out, springing up from the couch like it had burst into flames. One thing I knew for sure, there was no way in creation I was gonna to even attempt to squash him barefoot. Besides, all 180# of me might not even put a dent in this roach’s body armor. Even if I had been wearing Timberland work boots and was victorious in the old fashioned method of extermination, I knew I’d need a snowplow to scrape the mess off the floor. I ran to my very well stocked extermination supply cabinet and grabbed a can of the Bengal brand aerosol – a product I’ve since learned has been banned by the EPA because of its potency. I started spraying down my gigantic new enemy like he as Charlton Heston in the Planet of the Apes. He neither sped up nor slowed down…he just kept strutting. I don’t know whatever became of my most unwelcome visitor. He squeezed out under the front door into the hallway and I never saw him again. Luckily, the old lady next door wasn’t in the hall at the time. Old Scout surely would’ve knocked her right off her feet had she been.
The only two-legged pest story I can recall is that of the young neighbor across the hall. She was a nice enough person, but had a few idiosyncrasies. The way the apartments were laid-out, only a 4” thick plaster wall separated the headboards in our respective bedrooms. One early Monday morning before heading out to work, she came over to my apartment stammering and stumbling over her words in an attempt to tell me that doing any entertaining in her bedroom was very difficult and that we should both work at keeping the noise levels down. I agreed and told her, “no problem.” About a month had passed and other than a few pleasantries exchanged when we ran into one another, we really didn’t speak much. Imagine my shock and chagrin when the property manager called me at work one afternoon and asked me to please be respectful of my neighbors and keep the noise levels down. I felt totally violated when she informed me my shy neighbor had dropped off a cassette tape she recorded through an electrical outlet on our shared wall as evidence of my inconsiderate behavior.
My neighbor throws her cat droppings off her balcony into the bushes below which is within smelling distance of my window.
That’s just one of the things she does…
I had an upstairs neighbor once who, um…well, she liked me! All I had to do was bang a time or two on the ceiling and she would show up and blow me all night long!! Sometimes, she even brought me BEER! 
Funny, I was both pissed and relieved when she found herself a boyfriend.
Fagjunk Theology: Not just for sodomite propagandists anymore.
Gotcha beat. My wife and I lived in a ground-floor apartment in Greensboro, NC, with a bitchy divorcee, her bitchier teenage daughter, and their yappy dog (could have been an actual bitch!) in the apartment directly above us. The woman would sometimes work weekends, and leave the daughter in charge of walking the dog. Being the lazy little hellspawn that she was, the daughter, instead of walking the dog, would just put it outside on their patio (which of course was directly above ours) and spend her day babbling on the phone to her friends.
Did I mention that their patio floor was made of wooden 2x4s, separated by maybe 1/2 of an inch? Did I mention that she would leave the dog on the patio all day, never once taking it for a walk? You can guess what happened eventually…one nice Saturday afternoon, my wife and I were enjoying a couple of cold beers on our patio when we were treated to a real live golden shower. :eek:
We kept complaining to the woman upstairs about her dog urinating on our patio furniture, but of course her daughter would just lie and claim that she had been walking the dog, and the woman believed her over us, natch. We complained to the apartment manager too, but of course with no proof it came down to her word versus ours. Finally, we put a white towel down on our pation under the dog’s favorite spot, waited for the inevitable shower, then summoned the apartment manager right then to view the still-moist evidence.
They were moved out shortly thereafter.
Lucky you. I brought the manager over, showed him the trail of cat pee from the liter box, down the patio, and to the yellow puddle on the balcony railing and showed him the cat liter and droppings in the bushes and nothing has changed. The manager even said how horrible it smelled and that he couldn’t believe she could do that. Yet they are still here :rolleyes:
I’d like to apologize. I’m the bad neighbor. I have very loud, vigourous sex, and I try desperately to stay quiet. I use gags, pillows, anything I can think of to muffle the sound. I try to only make noise during decent hours when people aren’t trying to sleep.
Sorry.