To Our Upstairs Neighbours: Ecstasy Fuelled Parties At 4am Are Not OK!

The BBQ Pit
1

Dear Upstairs Neighbours,

You’re a group of 18year old boys living away from home for the first time and discovering new and exciting ways to spend you time. I’m so happy for you.
When my happiness ends is the point at which my doorphone is mistakenly rung at 4:30am, by one of your friends looking for the party, and unsure which apartment it’s in.

When the pain begins is when I am unable to go back to sleep because your living room is directly above our bedroom. I’m a reasonable woman, but irishfella was away, I have period pains, and it took me a long fucking time to get to sleep in the first place. So I don my slippers and dressing gown, and follow the incoherent screeching and thumping bass to your door. I’m naively unscared in situations like that, and I’ve just been told off on the phone by irishfella for leaving the flat, but if there was any chance that I could make you shut up, I was willing to take it.

One of your number answers the doorbell, and the lights may well be on, but from the glazed eyes and jaw clenching it does not appear as if anybody is home. Now, I’m not completely innocent, and I know that anyone coming back from a club at 4am who still wants to party and looks the way this guy does has not been sticking to legal intoxicants. Frankly, he’s fucked off his tits on E, and if he’s the one who gets to answer the door, I can only imagine what state the rest of you are in.

I politely tell him about the buzzer, and ask him to keep the noise down, knowing that it’s not going to make a difference, but feeling I should at least do that. The party continued at full volume until after 6am, when I was finally able to sleep again, but only after listening to some of your guests shouting and swearing their way down the stairs and out of the gate, while you called out your goodbyes from your balcony.

I told you that you were causing a disturbance and that it wasn’t the first time, and you still didn’t keep it down. Of course, in your state I realise that keeping the noise down might have been an unrealistically high expectation on my part, but at least you were given the courtesy of being warned. Come Monday morning, we’re calling the management company, the Resident Association and your landlord. We have a clear “no disturbances between 11pm and 8am” rule as part of the rental contracts in this complex, and you seriously broke it.

Understand, I don’t really want you evicted, I just don’t want that happening again. You need to wise the hell up and realise that while you get to sleep in at the weekends and take days off college, not everybody does. There are people with small children here, people who work nights and weekends, and there is an apartment full of interns from the nearby hospital who I know are sleep-deprived and on the edge of psychosis as it is. You should be bloody thankful your apartment is above ours, and not theirs.

This is not the first time you and your firends have caused a disturbance, but before it was always at around midnight, when you were getting ready to go out, and everyone could just about live with it. But 4:30am until almost 7am! Janey Mack, this shit is no longer funny.

So, boys, prepare to have few restless night wondering whether you get to stay in your flat, or have to look for a new place to live. I hope you’ll understand what it feels like when your neighbours stop you from sleeping.

Yours,

irishgirl

2

And look! I’m so tired and pissed off I can’t even spell right!

Mods-perhaps you could save my blushes and edit my spelling errors in the title-please?

3

Make’s you kinda nostalgic for herion addicts, don’t it? Just had to step over, not land in the pool o’vomit and get in the house.

aaaaaaaaahhh, memories.

4

I hate noisy neighbors. Our former downstairs guy had a really loud, but really shitty radio. Whether this is better or worse than huge subwoofers shaking you out of your shoes is debatable. He would tune that horrible radio to a Top 40 station at maximum volume in the middle of the night, then pass out drunk with the radio still on, still loud. The music would continue until he emerged from his coma-like state sometime the next afternoon.

5

That’s why I liked old houses that are converted into apartments. It’s nice whne you can access the breaker box to the offending neighbor’s apartment and switch them off.

6

I feel your pain. When I lived in Washington DC I had a second-floor apartment in a converted house with apartments above and below. It was great until the upstairs tenants moved out and two 18-year-old girls moved in upstairs who had obviously never lived in a big city before and didn’t have any idea how to get along with the neighbors.

Trying to be “cool” they would invite the neighborhood drug dealers over. One brought along his Pit Bull, which ripped out one of the bannisters on the stairway with his teeth.

They were very noisy - they would go in and out at late hours, stomping up and down the wooden staircase and slamming the doors. But the last straw was when they had an extremely loud party, starring some of the drug dealers, that went on until 4 AM. And apparently both girls left their own party at about 2 AM, leaving their apartment in the hands of their drugged out guests.

The problem with this was that when I woke up the next morning, I found that someone had stolen the fuses for my apartment, evidently thinking that they were for the one above. I had to go out to the hardware store to buy new fuses before I could make breakfast.

After that, I had no qualms. I and the other tenant complained to the landlord, and the girls were out the next month.

7

For my birthday, I got myself some earplugs.

My upstairs neighbors like to have extremely loud, racous sex at the worst times in the AM. (Or should that be XXX-loud???) Like 3:30AM. 5:20AM. Weeknights, weekend nights, it doesn’t matter.

One night, I was awoken to her obnoxious moaning, the screeching, the banging (har) of the headboard into the wall, and - I swear - a burning smell. From the friction of their wood bedframe on their wood floors??? Heh, maybe they’d get a clue if Chicago FD came banging (har har) on their door.

It’s horrible. They knock things off of things and on to the floor. It’s startling. If it was even the slightest bit sexy… But, oh hell no. I now keep my mop at my bedside. The better to bang (har har har) the ceiling with.

8

Q: Do you smoke after sex?

A: I dunno, I’ve never looked. :smiley:

9

If you do, slow down.

10

I find a call to the local police is always effective.

11

I remember my grad school days, holed up in an apartment surrounded by undergrads. On the few occasions when I got to leave the lab for a few hours of sleep and a shower, I was always kept up by drunken idiots partying in neighboring apartments. So I discovered the secrets to dealing with these people.

Secret #1: Get up every day at 5 AM. Of course, you were probably up already from the party noist, but even so it’s a good habit to get in.

Secret #2: Own a stereo that is governed by strategic arms treaties. I’m talking about a system where the tweeters are bigger than your head. Biiiig goddamn speakers, this is important.

Secret #3: Own as many Sex Pistols albums as possible. I find that Filthy Luchre Live is the best for this operation, but variety can’t hurt. Guns n Roses are okay, but they break out into too many damned ballads.

Now, if you haven’t figured it out yet, what you’ll need to do is line the speakers up against the shared wall with the offending apartment. Speakers facing the wall, not inward. Now, slap the Pistols in your CD player and as you leave for work shortly before sunrise, set the volume to kill and unleash on those motherfuckers. I’ve never had a neighbor that took more than twice to get the point.

12

laichle has an excellent method but a more firm and devious method of torture needs to be used for a cease and desist tactic: Englebert Humperdinck or some kind of Stars and Stripes music.
Althought, I did it my way by Sid Vicious is most excellent.

13

I tried John Philip Sousa on one of my dorm neighbors in college once. He told me the next morning he had had strange dreams about marching bands. :smack:

14

This reminds me to be thankful that my wife and I live in a house. A detached, single-family, suburban house, in a (fairly) quiet neighborhood. This month marks eleven years since I’ve lived in an apartment. :slight_smile:

15

While an admirable method, it’s one I can’t employ as my apartment also attaches to 3 other apartments, besides my moved-in-straight-from-HELL upstairs neighbors. The walls in this place are so damn paper thin, war against one neighbor inevitably turns into war against all, and I’ve got nothing against my other neighbors.

I’ve got the same problem as *colibri. Two eighteen/maybe 20 at the most girls moved in upstairs. These chicks are friggin’ obnoxious. You know when either of them is home. My S.O. has taken to proclaiming “tubby’s home!” whenever one of them comes home since you’d think they each weigh about 650 pounds by how loudly they stomp around. And one of them has the worst sense of balance in the universe. The girl falls down, constantly. Then laughs and laughs. I kid you not, I’ve been genuinely scared a couple of times that the damn ceiling was going to cave in. And they love inviting their equally loud and obnoxious friends over. I saw them walking up the stairs one day as I was leaving my apartment and one of them gave me a nasty look.

Oh, hell no. We was about to start brawlin’ right there on the stairwell, I tell you what!

One of them used to have loud obnoxious sex at all sorts of strange hours but fortunately I think her and her beau broke up and thank god she’s having one hell of a dry spell.

The only kind of payback I can do that won’t annoy any other neighbors is having as much loud, obnoxious sex of my own as humanly possible. See, my bedroom is the only room which only connects to their apartment, and no one else’s. I’ve taken to becoming quite the screamer. :smiley: