He probably should have known that CookingWithGas would get his charcoal put out one way or another.
We’ve currently got one of these neighbors with a similar dog. I wouldn’t say it’s a nightmare, especially compared to some of these other stories, but it’s really irritating. Our backyard and neighborhood would be almost idyllic if not for this one goddamned dog shattering the piece with its barking and long, plaintive whines, every single day, throughout the day, from around 6:30 a.m. until after dark. And we’ve got a bit of woods and a fence between us; I honestly don’t know how the neighbors who live right next to them can stand it. I really want to know whether they don’t realize how miserable they’re making the dozen or so neighbors who live around them, or they’re just such thoughtless assholes that they don’t care.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the library in disguise so I can research “how to make a blowgun” and “painless animal euthanasia.”
I was one, for a while. Then I got my meds straightened out.
Too, it was my first house after my divorce and I was perhaps a teensy bit overprotective of property lines and fanatically opposed to windchimes.
Pretty sure I’ve told this story here before, but: I lived in an apartment building with assigned spots. One day, mine was taken. Knocked on every door without luck until the fourth floor. “Excuse me, is your car in spot number two?”
Gruff voice, “So what if it is?”
Me, in a positively angelic tone: “Your lights are on.” (Which was true.)
Now, I don’t know how long it had been in my spot, but he sprinted down four flights, turned off the lights and moved the car. Nobody ever parked in my spot (so far as I know) again.
Lived next door to a rental house, the owner would rent to anybody that could pay the first months rent. Had a number of druggies, welfare mamas and hoarders live there. He finally sold the house, the buyer decided to take out all the trees on his property and a couple on mine. Cost him $4000 plus court costs for cutting down my trees without permission.
Currently have a guy that stores trash for 2 or 3 months till the neighbors complain then he hauls it all to the dump. He also has a couple junk cars and other crap piled in the back yard that we get to look at daily. My wife and I have filed a couple complaints with the city, despite what appears to be a strongly written law, we have been told there is not much that can be done. The city attorney just suggests we hire our own lawyer to deal with the guy.
I think I might have just met one. Having coffee out on the porch with my new neighbor, we met a couple just moving in upstairs. He was asked if he wanted a coffee, and replied with a “May the good lord bless you”. (First red flag) Within a minute, just out of the blue, he says to me “What’s your take on personal defense?” Uh-oh.
This reminds me of the closest thing I’ve had to nightmare neighbors. It was the first apartment I rented upon moving out on my own. It was originally a 3-story, twin house, which had been converted into a 1st floor 1-bedroom (which I rented) and a separate, large apartment taking up the top 2 floors.
Living upstairs was a working class family consisting of a father who was a truck driver, a mother who I don’t think worked, and a couple of teenage kids. Of course, since it had been built as a house, there was no sound insulation between the (hardwood) floors, and evidently the upstairs living room was directly over my bedroom, so I could clearly hear their TV when it was on, which it was for probably over 20 hours per day. Near as I could tell, the wife would stay up watching TV until about 2:00 AM, then the husband would get up about 5:30 AM, and turn the TV on while he was getting ready for work. So there was a window of about 3 and a half hours per 24-hour period when their TV was NOT reverberating loudly through my bedroom ceiling. (This in addition to the fact that they were loud in general, apparently rolling bowling balls around and dropping chains on the floor as in that “Upstairs Neighbors” video that made the rounds a while ago, and routinely had shouting matches ending with one of them stomping down the stairs and slamming the front door.)
We lived in the Bangkok suburbs for seven years, on the fourth floor of a condominium building whose first floor was commercial space. Our unit looked into the courtyard, and straight below was a restaurant. They were outside washing dishes late and there early doing preparation and scrubbing the sidewalk. Repeated complaints failed to yield results. This went on for the last six of our seven years there. Only after we moved back into Bangkok proper did we get any relief.
My first time in Hawaii, I was living in an apartment that came with a parking space, but I had no car. Didn’t matter, the space was connected to that apartment, and I had to pay higher rent than the nonspace apartments. It was a small five-unit building with two spaces and the only place I could find within my budget at the time. One next-door neighbor was a South Korean businessman who saw no reason he could not park there since I had no car, and he refused to pay me rent for it. I finally managed to rent the space to another neighbor.
We also had a next door neighbor from hell with a dog at our old place. She would leave for work about 7am, put the dog out in the back yard, and the dog would be out there all alone until she got home around midnight and brought him in. She apparently spent evenings after work and all of the weekend at her boyfriend’s, so this dog was chained up in the backyard all alone every day, and would bark and howl constantly. Besides being chained up, she had one of those electric wires running along the base of her fence to keep him from trying to jump it, so I couldn’t even lean over the fence to give him some attention because he was scared to come near the fence. I called the cops a few times about the noise, but they wouldn’t do anything unless I filed a formal complaint. I called animal control and the humane society to see if I could report the dog as abandoned, but they said as long as he had food and water and shelter there was nothing they could do. I felt so sorry for the dog and couldn’t figure out why the hell she even had one if she was never around to take care of it.
I had a neighbor who sometimes had, ummm, ‘visitors’.
Those ‘visitors’ would park all willy-nilly, wherever they liked, including other neighbor’s driveways. They ordered people back into their house, they wouldn’t let other people onto the street to go to their house. Wasn’t the only time he had ‘visitors’, either. Those ‘visitors’ musta thought they were the cops or sumpin’.
Yeah he was so horrible that my hearing dog hated him too ! No one liked him at my condo .
I wonder how the pidgees are doing.
I still think of them too. But you’ll be pleased to know Honolulu is filled with white pidgees. We don’t have a balcony though.
The family across the street in the biggest and nicest house in the area was melting down when we moved in. Right away he earned the name “Angry Balding Man”. Many screaming arguments with the Fuck You’s flying left and right. Screaming at the two kids. Squeeling cars out of the driveway with slamming doors.
There was a poor neglected dog in the backyard. We never laid eyes on him because of their fence, but he would bark at us when we came out front. I started barking and baying back at him, and we sort of did that almost every day. It sounded like the poor dog was happy to hear from me once a day.
They finally moved out when the wife started an affair with the gardener. Whom she yelled at all the time.
bonus points if the city billed him for the truck roll.
I lived in a big house that was divided into two apartments. I was downstairs, they were upstairs. The guy worked at pizza place and got home at about midnight. Most nights he would come home and crank up the stereo. This was at the dawn of CDs and he had exactly two. He played the same ones over and over and over. One was Bob Seger, Live Bullet. The other was Hank Williams Jr. Over and over and over. Many nights he would have friends over, lots of yelling and (I think) wrestling. His wife never spoke to me but seemed weird. He had two small daughters, maybe 3 and 5 years old. I never heard them speak words but the daughters communicated with each other in their own language which consisted almost entirely of shrieks and screeches at high volume. I believe he was also dealing drugs. He normally didn’t turn his front porch light on but about once a month he would turn that light on and about 20 people would stop by through the course of the night and each guest would stay about 5 minutes. Subtle. The good thing was it spurred me to start seriously planning and then buying my first house.
When I was tiny, we lived in a semi-detatched house, the end of a little row of houses, basically surrounded by farmland. My parents had a little orchard, grew most of their own vegetables, and kept chickens, it was all rather idyllic. Then the house attached to ours was inherited, I think about the time I was born, by the previous owner’s feckless son.
He decided that this was the country, ergo, he was going to live a country lifestyle, so he bought a goat. Apparently he was under the impression that goats just randomly generated milk, so the single (female, he did get that right) goat was something of a disappointment, and he just started leaving it to its own devices. Now, I love animals, the weird, the dangerous, the ones other people consider unlovable, but that goat put me off goats, probably for life. It had two joys in its otherwise dull existence; breaking into our garden to eat all our vegetables, and attacking me and my brother if we ventured beyond the fence (say, visiting the kids two houses down). The neighbour would kick it out to forage in the field behind the house, which the farmer didn’t so much mind when he was grazing cows there, but when he was growing corn…?
Then the neighbour bought pigs.
He also used to deal in stolen bathrooms (don’t ask me for details, I was little, Dad used to try convince me he hid them under his coat like guys do with stolen watches in cartoons: “Wanna buy a sink?”), which meant we got woken up by dawn police raids.
He collected rusted out junk cars, and when finally persuaded he needed to get rid of them, dragged them off his property, and left them on the verge.
He got a dog too. Actually, he got two, he lost his first dog after he left the guys three doors down looking after it for a week while he was on holiday; their place was just so much nicer, he couldn’t keep it in the house or yard any more, every time he opened the door or a window it was back at the Promised Land of three doors down like a bullet, until he gave up.
The second dog was kept chained, basically all the time. It was a big, scary German Shepard, and I say scary, it scared the living daylights out of our big soppy German Shepard. It was supposed to be a guard dog, but he couldn’t get near it either after a while.
That was about the point we moved.
Five word summary of my nightmare neighbors: beer can soccer at midnight.
A few years ago the older son of the family next door was wanted by the police. He had been in jail and then violated parole. For a while we had the police coming by at odd hours searching the house which was listed as his residence. The police coming here asking if we had seen him. I gladly would have told them if we had seen him, but he had not been around during that time. He was always playing his music super loud during the day before he went to jail. When I asked the mother to tell him to turn it down, she looked scared and said there was nothing she could do. I guess they caught him because it’s been a while since we’ve seen either him or the police.
When I was in college I was living upstairs in a four-plex. For several months a husband and wife lived across the hall. They were both alcoholics and were drunk pretty much all the time. They would have screaming fights every day, throwing things, yelling the most vile things at each other. Incredibly vile, disgusting and apparently true things. One night I came home and their door was cracked open. I heard a guy telling the husband that he couldn’t get him hard because he was too drunk. I couldn’t get in my door fast enough. They were both seriously the scum of the earth. I complained to the landlord but he didn’t care until they apparently ran out of money and he kicked them out.
I may have told this story before about how I thought about killing the husband. They had a sweet little dog. The only decent thing about the guy was that he loved the dog. One late night, he started banging on my door and screaming at me that I had stolen his dog. I kept telling him that I didn’t have the dog but he would not stop. It really pissed me off and finally I opened the door and screamed back that I did not have his dog. He was standing at the top of the stairs, weaving back and forth. For a moment I thought “all I have to do is reach out and ……push”. I really wanted to do it. But then I realized he was so drunk he probably wouldn’t die from the fall and might remember so I just slammed the door in his face. (And the dog was back the next day.) It made me very happy to see them kicked to the curb.