Sort of the inverse of this thread, how long would you notice a missing co-worker or neighbor before you checked up on them? If she doesn’t call you, how long before you would call your mother?
I noticed my neighbor’s house was unnaturally still for more than a week, but I did nothing about it, other than see if someone was taking in her mail. She eventually came home form vacation, but she could have been dead in there.
I call my mom twice a month or so, but she appears to have more friends than my neighbor, so mom’d get found quicker.
It depends on the neighbor. Both of my neighbors are single, but I’d notice one a lot sooner than the other.
My male neighbor, I’d notice reasonably soon I think. He’s often gone for weekends, but he’s nearly never gone on the weekdays. Plus, I hear his truck leave every weekday at 6am or so. If he were MIA for more than ~48 hours in the middle of a week, I’d be aware and calling someone, at least to make sure his adorable kitty is taken care of.
My female neighbor could die and I wouldn’t know until the smell breached my walls. She’s never home, all of her plants are dead, her mail is RARELY picked up, and her landlady once had to rescue a kitten that was in her back “storage” area that she had obviously given water to at some point, but it was gone. It’s like she doesn’t exist. I really hope nothing happens to her while we’re neighbors, because I would feel bad if it did, and I could have helped.
My mom says that when she was a teenager the police broke into an old ladies house thinking she was dead because all the neighbors had not seen her for a few days…it turns out she was with her son and perfectly fine but maybe not after she saw her house had been broken into.
Well… this actually happened to us, a couple months ago.
We hadn’t seen our neighbour in a couple weeks but weren’t all that worried about it. We weren’t close (he gave us his pop bottles and we said hello in the hallway) and hardly saw him most of the time anyway. He was blind, so he didn’t go out all that often and the first week we had been pretty sick all of us and hadn’t left the house except to pick up gingerale.
The first thing we noticed was the smell. Kinda like dirty diapers so we wondered if we’d somehow put a dirty one somewhere other than the garbage and forgotten about it (hardly likely, I’m fastidous about that but that’s what we thought). Then we noticed a bag from the National Library of the Blind on his door that was left there and not taken in for a few days.
Finally after scouring the apartment for a misplaced diaper (never found of course) and realizing hey this has been there for way too long we mentioned it to someone from the building who had come by for other reasons. That afternoon they opened the door. He’d apparently been dead for 2 weeks (we didn’t notice the smell until after about a week).
We were going about our business but we could hear them talking just outside our door. He must have fallen somehow and died there, he had no family that we knew of but we’d lived next door to a dead body for 2 weeks :eek: We could even hear the policeman kinda getting sick (the sound really echoed in the hallways so you could hear darn near anything. And of course we were a little curious as to what was happening initially so we peeked out the spyhole in our door)
We felt horrible that we didn’t notice and say anything sooner to anyone, and rather ill that the smell in the bedroom was what it was.