I had a neighbor that would slam the door so loud it would make me jump -and- move the six inch thick reinforced concrete floor every time they left or arrived home (at 5:18AM sometimes). They were odd. They would leave the apartment windows open all of the time and yell at each other. Theres nothing like a hearing a single mother yell at her eighteen year old son “NO, YOU’RE THE FUCKED UP ONE!” and listening to all of their phone conversations. They would leave for a month or so at a time (nice and quiet) and leave the windows open I really did not care too much then, but when a hurricane ran thru the area, the windows were still open. It was the fastest response I had ever seen by building managment. Those vertical blinds were dancin’ that day.
My father’s neighbor is, unfortunately, a little unbalanced. She’s been living in the neighborhood since I was a kid, and she was never very outgoing. But since her husband died and her kids moved out, she’s gone off the deep end.
Keep in mind, my parents live in a NYC suburban post-WWII Leave It To Beaver neighborhood. They’ve lived there 45 years or so. Nice quiet neighborhood with beautifully maintained homes and manicured lawns.
Except for Pat, who lives right next to my parents. She cuts her grass maybe once a month, by going out and attacking it with a weed whacker. The place has peeling paint, and the siding under it is gray with weathering. My father and I have observed, from his back patio at twilight, a family of raccoons clambering out of her attic vent. God only knows what else lives there.
My father once offered to cut her lawn, since he was doing his own and was willing to just keep pushing the mower across her lawn too. She sharply told him to stay off her property.
Her neglect may be driving property value down, and since my parents are both in their 70s, their house may not fetch as much as it might with Tobacco Road right next door. My father also wryly observes that Pat will probably live to be 130, just out of spite.
Some of these remind me of a scene from The Simpsons involving Otto the busdriver:
Otto: Hey landlord. I left for a while and when I came back some idiot changed my locks, padlocked the door and put up an eviction notice!
Landlord: Yeah. That was me.
Otto: Wha-?? But WHY!?
Landlord: Because you haven’t payed your rent!
Otto: Oh, bummer. Well, can I at least get my stuff?
Landlord: All we found in there were a couple old magazines and a jar of mustard.
Otto: Whoa, I’ve got mustard!?
Mr. J and I own a house that we rent to his sister and her friend. For the first couple of years they lived there, they would continuously complain about the neighbors across the street who were, according to them, morons and extremely weird people.
One of their biggest problems was the huge amount of trash generated by these people, quite a bit of which seemed to gravitate across the road into sis-in-law’s yard. At the edge of the front yard and partly in the street, the neighbors had 2 large metal trash cans which always seemed to be full. Quite often, they would set plastic trash bags on top and set them on fire.
There were many shouting confrontations in the street and police calls, with nothing ever being settled.
Any conversation with sis-in-law would invariably include whatever weird antics the neighbors were engaged in, such as the time they made a little cemetery in their front yard for Halloween and actually put names on the “stones.”
We felt that sis-in-law was a little weird herself and put little faith in her complaints. However, that changed shortly after these neighbors suddenly moved out.
Turns out, the man of the house (or skinny-ass, as sis-in-law called him), was a serial murderer. He had been arrested for something minor and while in jail talked over his dirty deeds with fellow inmates, some of whom turned him in. I believe several cases of missing and murdered women are now considered solved, and skinny-ass is on death row. He was convicted of only one of the murders, but it was heinous in the extreme. Sis-in-law swears that one of the names on one of the stones in the Halloween cemetery was the name of this murdered woman.
Still creeps me out to think about them living across the street from this guy and having fights with him.
I’ve moved around a lot in the years since HS.
I had this cool little place in a triplex which was just right for me, (rent $119 a month!! Power $19. That should tell you how long ago) but it had roaches. I would bomb, the neighbor would then get my hoard of bugs. He would bomb and the last guy would get them all! He would bomb and it all would start again. Now and then the last guy and I would bomb and the poor buy in the middle would almost be swept out on a tide of roaches.
I moved when Yuppies bought the place, did some improvements, jacked up the rents far too high and promptly put the place back on the market for an investment.
I moved to a bigger place, at $135 a month. Part of a duplex which faced another duplex and I loved it. The buildings had to have been built in the 1940s from their interiors of fitted pine and set on 24 inch foundations. Complete with terrazzo floors! My neighbors were cool for years. We had parties, mingled with each other and so on. Then a couple of chicks moved in next to me. No problem – but they were somewhat seedy and in their 20s.
Shortly after two construction thugs of the same age moved across the street and discovered the chicks, who were pleased to share their pot and spread their legs. Before I knew it, there was loud music blaring out all of the time that did not get shut down for long, the two drunken construction thugs got in fist fights with one of my neighbors, they threatened others, had fights with the girls, threatened me and smashed an intercom system on my door. When they discovered that I worked nights and slept days, one of them started blowing a trombone in the courtyard. When told by my other neighbors to knock it off because I was asleep, the b*****d went to my window and blew it there. Then he got into a fight with a neighbor who wanted him to knock it off.
One day I realized that one of my neighbors had moved, and the other was getting ready to do the same. I started looking around for a new place. The land lord would not get involved. I came to the conclusion that so long as the girls humped the guys who supplied booze and dope, the place was going to remain shit. So I reluctantly moved.
About 6 months later a friend of mine told me that both guys got their asses thrown in jail on assorted charges and the girls had moved! I thought about moving back, but then I discovered that the land lord had sold the place to a company and all of the tenants were being given time to move. They tore it down later and put up a blasted office building.
There are worse stories than mine in here for sure but what the hell.
Three months ago I was lying in bed, reading. It was nearly midnight. Now, I sleep with earplugs – the legacy of a dog my family owned at one point who barked outside my window, now I’m hooked on the damn things – and I hear what sounds like a sudden rainstorm. A REALLY sudden rainstorm.
Slowly, I peek over the edge of my book. There is water POURING around the ceiling fan, and pouring down the vanity mirror, and into the bathroom, and through the living room ceiling in about three places, and through the kitchen light and through the breaker box. I am being flooded. I remember thinking for a few seconds that this wasn’t real, I must have fallen asleep. But it wasn’t. So I go into panic mode, call maintenance, put on some decent pajamas and go outside and see if anybody else knows what is going on.
The morons upstairs from me didn’t know how to turn off their water heater, which had busted big time. Their floor was flooded, but I was getting it worse since it was coming through the damn ceiling. The next-door neighbor gets their heater turned off after about fifteen minutes (I think) and it takes about an hour for the water to quit running into my apartment.
Now, the morons upstairs from me say, “We’re going to bed. We have work in the morning. We’ll call maintenance then.” I am infuriated. The freaking building is FLOODED and they think it can just WAIT until 8:30??? There is a reason we have 24-hour maintenance; they CAN come out in the middle of the night. I end up packing up myself and my traumatized cat and going to a friend’s house for the rest of the night. The carpet people arrived at about 2:30 and sucked up the worst of it, I found out later. I might as well have stayed, I got no sleep.
Water heaters break. But to go to bed in the flood and not even bother with calling the damn maintenance people whose damn JOB it is to deal with these things??? How moronic can you get? I wonder what they’ve had said if it had been a fire. “Oh well, we’ll call the fire deparment in the morning, we have to get some sleep.”
I had to move. At least I’m now the upstairs neighbor, and I have a new water heater, and if something horrible happens to it, my floor will get it but I won’t have water coming down from the freaking ceiling. And I didn’t lose my computer.
Well, I might be a New Yorker, but I live in a trailer park, so of course I have LOTS of neighbor stories if you stretch your definition of neighbor to include all the rednecks in the park. For instance, one entire half of the trailer park is full of people who are all related. I kid you not. 25 trailers, 2 last names, 1 big family.
But it’s my next-door neighbor who I’ll tell you about now. We live in the only double-wide in the trailer park, so we are blessed with three sets of Big Picture Windows instead of the standard-issue one. One of the sets is on one of the long sides of the trailer, facing my neighbor’s house, whose single set of big picture windows faces directly into ours. We had the grace to hang up big curtains and we put the cages for our two African grey parrots in front of the window for extra view-blockage so they can’t really see into our living room when the curtains are open. She has no curtains at ALL.
The next door neighbor is a 30-something single mother of one. Her son is about 6 or 7 by now and he likes to take all his old toys, go out to the side yard (which is on OUR plot of land, not theirs), rip the lid off the septic tank, and shove all the toys in it, which isn’t too great for our plumbing. Luckily the septic tank is attached to HIS house too, so him and his mom have to pay for his stupidity just as much as we do.
The mother has three regular boyfriends and as far as I can tell she also has a thing with the man who delivers the natural gas to the trailer park heaters. She used to have four boyfriends, until two of them showed up at her house at the same time. We heard the fight very well. Those two left and one of them was promptly replaced.
She regularly gets into screaming matches with her boyfriends which usually end up involving her son. Lots of loud voices, screams, thuds, crying. Then lots of loud voices, screams, thuds, moaning as they make up.
On Friday nights she’ll have sex in the living room right in front of the picture window. She apparently doesn’t care that we can see in. Also, as far as I can tell, she has no normal light fixture in that room, only a red light.
When she’s not having sex or fighting, she puts her stereo on loud enough that I can tell what song she’s listening to from my bedroom on the opposite side of my house from hers.
He plays in the SEPTIC TANK? Isn’t that unhygienic?
Lord knows what kinds of diseases he can pick up!
Well, I’m not sure if he’s playing in it or just shoving stuff into it…
I knew I was in trouble when the new downstairs neighbor refused to acknowledge me when I said hello. He would not make eye contact and still doesn’t. His girlfriend seems normal, but really, she can’t be. For a while I wasn’t even sure exactly who lived there, since there were all sorts of extra people living there on the weekend. In any case, here are some of the lovely things they have done. Some are merely annoying, others are health hazards.
[ul]
[li]Habitual BBQing under my balcony. I have asked them several times to please move the BBQ out onto the lawn so I don’t have to smell their nasty food all day, to no avail.[/li][li]Loud arguments about money late at night or early in the morning. I have not called the cops yet, but next time this happens I will.[/li][li] They have a rather mangy old German Shepherd that barks excessively and wakes me up occasionally. The guy let the dog out off-leash, then scream at the dog to come back when he wanders too far. This is still a daily occurence.[/li][li]They used to habitually not clean up after their dog. This pisses me off big time, not just because it’s nasty, but because I am a responsible dog owner and it’s because of assholes like them that I can’t take my dog to all the places I would like to. I reported this to condo management, as did another person. They of course denied it, but were fined anyway. Which leads to the next item.[/li][li]Garbage bags of unknown stuff starts accumulating on their patio. It turns out the guy decided he was going to prove that he picked up after the dog, so he starts saving it (apparently hermetically sealed, since I have an over-developed sense of smell, and I didn’t detect it) in bags on the patio. This apparently went on for several months. Management gets the health department to come out and make them clean it up. Unfortunately the scumbag guy is not around and the girlfriend ends up having to deal with it.[/li][li]Kept rotting garbage in their garage, causing a fly infestation.[/li][/ul]
Most of this happened the first year - they have gotten slightly more civilized recently - I am hoping this lasts as I don’t want to move.
I get up this morning, and go out to my truck, and I look down and MY NEIGHBOR HAD EGDGED MY LAWN WITHOUT ASKING!
Can you believe the audacity! I retaliated by MOWING HIS LAWN, that bastard.
Now that’s comedy…