Their heavy footsteps that make it sound like they’re stomping around with combat boots.
Their propensity to create very loud crashing thumps, as if they were dropping bowling balls just for the hell of it.
Their habit of turning up their stereo loud enough for me to hear it clearly, for no good reason. (Thank God they don’t do it during normal sleep hours.)
Their fights, and the guy’s habit of smacking his girlfriend around, especially since it’s gotten harder to tell whether the girlfriend’s cries are screams of pain (though there have been clear cases of that) or drunken revels. (There are many other reasons to Pit this other than noise, obviously.)
Their toilet, which runs long and/or for a few seconds randomly for no good reason, and which the maintenance guys can’t find anything wrong with. I think it’s the reason why my water bill went up $10 in a month.
I pit people who live in apartment buildings and expect to hear absolutely NO NOISE coming from the apartments surrounding them.
I’d suggest that they buy a house, but they’re usually the types who would bitterly complain that the neighbor mows his lawn at the wrong time, or has the audacity to work on his car or trim his hedges at 3pm. Or that they can STILL hear the neighbor’s stereo.
I’d suggest that they move to a remote spot where they don’t have to put up with the noises other people make, but them squirrels are fucking LOUD! And who told those birds to come up here and make noise? Goddamned nature!
You have many good points. I’ve wondered about how my neighbors react to me when I watch TV at all hours. (Though I do try to keep the volume at reasonable levels.)
However, I’ve been living in this apartment for years, and the past eight months are the first time I’ve EVER had a problem with neighbors like this. I still maintain that the amount of stomping and object dropping simply is not normal. And I still reserve the right to be annoyed when I’m kept awake for over half an hour at 4 am by a toilet. Then there’s the whole domestic abuse thing (first time I ever called 911).
ETA: And I’m itching to be able to afford a home of my own. At least then I can install windows that shut out what I don’t want to hear. (Remember that one TV ad with all the sounds of nature in the morning coming through an open window, and a guy appears in frame, shuts the window - immediately cutting off all the sounds - and goes back to bed? That’s my dream, baby.)
Chimera, you do have a point (there are, indeed, some apartment dwellers who expect, and unreasonably so, to never hear ANY evidence that they share contiguous walls with other people), but I don’t think that **Leaper’s **expectations, as he described them in his OP, are unreasonable. I mean, how loud does one’s stereo or TV really need to be?
I’m an apartment dweller, and while I don’t expect can-hear-a-rat-piss-on-cotton quiet, I certainly hope that my neighbors realize, just as I do, that their noise has the potential to affect other people. That’s why, for instance, I make sure to walk quietly so that my downstairs neighbors aren’t disturbed (I have hardwood floors–alas, with no subfloor–and I don’t want to cover them with carpet). Or why I put my shoes on in the living room, as opposed to the bedroom (which is above theirs), especially since I leave for work late at night when other people are asleep. Or any of the other things that I do (or don’t do): Because I don’t want to unreasonably disturb my neighbors.
Of course, I can’t understand why many other people (not all, mind you, but many) can’t/won’t have the same consideration. (And no, I swear that I’m not the Messiah or anything like that, but I do take this kind of stuff rather seriously.)
Leaper: I TOTALLY feel your pain (and, really, WTF is up with that butterfingers shit?). You could try speaking with the neighbors, but given the dude’s apparent propensity for violence…well, that’s a tough one. Of course, there’s always the option of speaking with the landlord and getting him/her to deal with your neighbors, but given (a) too many landlords’ priority of “give me my rent” over anything else, and (b) again, the neighbor’s violent behavior, I don’t expect that you’d have much luck there.
At any rate, good luck, 'cause I know how much this must suck for you.
(And now that I’ve adequately procrastinated, I’m off to finish working on a five-page paper that has to be done before I leave town this afternoon and head to Philadelphia for Yom Kippur. And I still have NO firm idea of what the professor wants with this damn thing. Aaargh!)
I’ve been there. I hope to God I never have to live underneath anybody again.
But the appropriate people to pit here are the ones who plan and build apartment buildings to these specifications. And maybe the fates in general for decreeing that you have to live in an apartment.
Do what I do, shake your impotent fist at them. The bastards.
First things first; if you want monastic silence, go and live in a cave. If you want to live in closer proximity to other people, expect them to make a bit of noise - especially during ‘normal’ waking hours. If outside noise is disturbing you, find your favourite music tracks and whack that volume up until all you can hear is what you want to hear. If the annoyance is occuring when you need to sleep ( assuming you don’t work nights.), and you haven’t got the balls to front them about it, the best I can suggest is treating them to a taste of what you are getting, and showing them what an anti-social neighbour behaves like. When they come to complain, they’ll either accept your point or chin you, but at least it will be out in the open, and you’ll know exactly where you stand and how much slack you can cut this annoyance.
Sorry, no, you don’t have a point. There’s a major difference between normal noise and excessive noise. There’s a major difference between walking softly and dropping furniture. There’s a major difference between watching TV at a low volume and doing construction.
Leaper, are you my husband? Because I have the exact same complaints about my neighbours upstairs (well, except for the girlfriend abuse–that was the downstairs neighbours it turned out, and we don’t have a water bill either). I keep wanting to go up and tell them that this ISN’T a freakin’ dorm, and dammit I’m not sure if I should be worried for anyone’s safety or not. And when it’s happening at 10pm, fuckit but I need some SLEEP.
I don’t know what’s going on up there, and am a little afraid to find out, but when I can feel the vibrations from their apparent cement clog recitals, they’re being too damned loud.
Can we have the neighbour with the squeaky bed back?
I dunno, ivan, I think there’s a point of noise annoyance between “life’s too short, get over it” and “go tell the abusive upstairs neighbor to pipe down, please.” Luckily, the Pit was made for such middle grounds.
For an example of one, I loved everything about my last apartment, except for an upstairs phenomena that I began referring to as Technotub.
Every day, somewhere between the hours of five and seven PM, the guy/gal/entity upstairs would put on loud (and I mean LOUD), thumping, European house music, and start running his shower at full blast. Then, at roughly fifteen-second intervals, he would do something that created a sound like he was filling up a bucket of water from the showerhead and dumping it directly into the bathtub. Coupled with techno, you would get:
This would continue rhythmically, water dumping every fifteen seconds, for at least an hour. Every day.
What was frustrating about it was not so much the noise as the fact that, try as I might, I could not even come up with a single rational explanation as to what event could possibly lead to that combination of sounds, for an hour, every day. It haunts me to this day.
Until I bought my house in Chicago I was convinced that there was a city ordinance stating that everyone who rented the apartment above mine was legally required to have either a bowling alley or tap-dancing elephants.
I did have a bit of a laugh a little over a month ago. I was sitting in the living room of my single-story townhouse and heard footsteps overhead. I went outside and found that the HOA had sent crews out to clean out the gutters and blow all the leaves off the roofs in preperation for Hannah, which was due to blow through central NC in a few days.
That’s what it sounds like when somebody washes their hair in the shower. It takes in the water like a sponge, and then when they run their hands through it it all comes out and makes a SPOLOOSH.
My downstairs neighbour has decided that the best time to play the guitar and [del]sing[/del] wail like a banshee is between the hours of 11 PM and 2 AM. I’m ready to coldclock the bastard.
OK, but there’s a difference between realistic and unrealistic. I fully expect to hear my upstairs neighbor walking around. What I do not have to tolerate is her walking around in hard-soled shoes.
