So I Was Sitting Here Earlier, Watching TV When...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

…I heard someone trying to get in my front door. I could hear them trying to work the lock, turning the knob and trying to push the door open. “What the heck?” I thought as I headed toward the sound. I debated opening the door. Could be a crazed killer running from the law, after all.

I settled for pulling aside the window blinds on the door and peering out. A woman’s face looked expectantly back. Through the pebbly, translucent glass, it sort of looked like my sister. But my sister doesn’t have a key to my place and she would knock first even if she did.

I opened the door a crack. The woman there did indeed look like my sister in an if-the-light-was-low-enough way. There was plenty of sun yet, though, and I briefly wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me. Not knowing what else to say, I came up with a bewildered, “Yes?”

The woman must have been just as stunned to see me as I was to see her. Several seconds went by before she said anything. I was beginning to wonder if she was drunk when she said, “Oh, I should be upstairs!”

Her accent was such that I realized that, yes, she meant to see my neighbor directly above me, who spoke the same way. I agreed, “Yes! Upstairs!” We said goodbye with her probably relieved to have realized her mistake and I, myself, relieved that she didn’t appear to be a crazed killer.

It was the kind of experience that kind of makes you doubt your sanity for a moment, but in the end, no harm done. I still wonder, though, if she was drunk. How do you confuse a ground floor apartment with a second floor one, anyway? If a friend trusts you enough to give you a spare key, it seems they’d have invited you to their apartment enough for you to know where it is or at least, they’d tell you that its the first one at the* top* of the stairs, not under it.

It reminded me of the time when I was young. The houses in the neighborhood looked pretty much the same but ours was on a largeish corner lot. We were all sitting around one evening when the front door opened and in walked two women, chatting to one another. One looked around and said, “Oh! We got the wrong house!” She apologized and they left.

Anything like this ever happen any of you?

2

I think I’d have pounded on the inside of the door saying, "LET. ME. OUT. OF. HERE. NOW! "

3

Right after I bought my first house, but before I moved in, a friend went by to check the place out. Since the front door was open she walked in. She looked around, called out my name, heard the shower going, and left. On her way out she called somebody using the pretty red telephone–she was kind of surprised that I had gotten a red one. Later she told me she really liked what I’d done with the house and she loved the spiral staircase. Except:

I hadn’t done anything with the house. The house I bought did not have a shower. It did not have a red phone, or any phone. It did not have a spiral staircase (yet). She had walked into the house next door (and yes, there were numbers on both of them and I had not given her the wrong address). Either that or she had walked into some parallel reality.

Years later–same house–I had just painted the exterior, and my neighbor two doors down had just painted the exterior of her house. The only things the two paint jobs had in common was that they were recent and long overdue. One day a man who I had once worked for, and who had been to my house a couple of times, years before, strolled in and looked at me quizzically. I said hi and then asked me what he was doing there and he said, “Where’s Cheri?” I told him she lived two doors down . . . they had been going together for a couple of years at that point so I thought he knew that–they were practically living together. But this guy was known to be extremely absent-minded (though brilliant).

4

I live in a kind of out of the way place so people don’t really swing by unless they are coming to see me. But I have had a similar experience with cars. I have actually gotten in and tried to start another person’s car. I have also walked up and found a rather distracted women sitting in my driver’s seat looking very lost.

[SIZE=2]Nobody here ever locks their cars doors, except for me now.

5

I had the opposite happen to me this past summer.

I had just moved into a new apartment complex in August, and one day I went out the back door. This was only the second time or so I had used the back door, so when I went to come back in, I went in the wrong door (as it turns out) because they all looked alike. I went in the door, went to apartment 2A and started fiddling with the knob and lock, wondering why it would’t unlock. After a moment, someone came to the door, and just a second before he opened it, it dawned on me that I had walked into the wrong building. I said ‘I’m sorry - wrong apartment’ and walked downstairs and left through the front entrance.

All would have been ok, except that the guys dad (or someone older) walked out on his balcony to start yelling at me as I walked out the front door. He had an accent and was going on and on about how I’m stupid and made these hand gestures to imply I was an idiot.

I almost replied ‘I may be stupid, but I can change that. You’ll always be a dick’. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of that response right away :slight_smile:

6

Welcome to my world…

7

In a lot of European countries, the first floor is the one above the ground floor. Your neighbor might have gotten used the US convention (ground floor = first floor) and forgotten that her friend still used the one from wherever they came from (ground floor, first floor, second floor, etc.)

8

Yeah.

Years back, I lived in a low-rent apartment on the ground floor. We’d been there for months without any incident.

One night it was very hot, but the AC had not yet been turned on. We decided to camp out in the living room where it was cooler.

Deep in the middle of the night, around 3 AM, I woke. After a while, I perceived a barely audible tapping noise.

After some confusion on my part, I determined the noise might be from the front door. I crept to the door and looked out the peep hole.

A very large, very overweight black man was standing at the door, wearing nothing but briefs-style underwear. He was very quietly tapping the door with a fingernail.

Oh course I was flabbergasted. I had no idea what to do, so I lay low for what seemed like ages and eventually he left.

We laughed over the story the next day. Were we living in a former crack house or something? Why would a person in underwear be trying to get our attention in a way that clearly wouldn’t wake us at 3:00 in the morning?

However, the following night, he was back.

Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Maddeningly the Poe-esque sound tormented me. In the bowels of the night, the bizarre, undressed stranger waited with great patience. Click, click, click.

So I decided I’d had enough.

I opened the door.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, in a perfectly normal voice, upon seeing me. He nodded politely.

Then he turned and walked away, unhurried, in his underwear.

We never saw him again.

To this day I have no idea what that was about.

Sailboat

9

I live in an old house that’s been converted into three apartments. The upper floor is one unit, the front of the ground floor is another, and the back of the ground floor is my residence. I occasionally get people knocking at my door while looking for another apartment, and my guests have been known to erroneously climb the stairs or knock at the “true” front door as well.

The only time someone unwanted (by me, anyway) actually walked into my place, however, was shortly after I moved to Lafayette in 2001. It was a warm day, so I had my door open, and this guy just waltzed in. Fortunately, he quickly realized his error, apologized, and went around to the street-facing entrance, where his buddy was waiting.

The building generally caters to Purdue students, so there’s been quite a bit of turnover from year to year, even semester to semester. Last fall, a resident of the front apartment locked herself out, and took the chance of knocking on my door at night to ask if she could use my phone to call the management company. She seemed trustworthy, so I let her in, and her story turned out to be legitimate.

A few weeks later, I let her use my computer when she was having a problem connecting to the Internet. At Halloween, she gave me a mixture of raisins, peanuts, and candy to thank me for being a good neighbor. Fear of crime in such situations is generally groundless, but I likely wouldn’t have allowed certain previous tenants of my building to enter my apartment any more than I would have invited that dude who came begging for food one day to come in and take whatever he wanted from the refrigerator or cupboard.

10

My first week in a new apartment, about 3AM, some friends of the previous tenant let themselves in with a key. My father happened to be visiting to help with assorted moving chores, and let me tell you, those people (who were quite drunk, probably just coming from the bar down the street) are lucky I don’t keep guns in the house. Especially since they didn’t know their friend had moved, and were trying to throw my father out for squatting.