Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Don't Move Next Door to Them

 


My newest guilty pleasure. This is a website that is designed to provide a community service. If you are moving into a new neighborhood and you want to see how friendly it is, you simply pop in a zipcode and up pops any stories about problems in the area. So, essentially, if you see a lot of crabapples around, you skip the neighborhood.

Of course, this now takes on a life of its own. It's a place where the anger around us just overflows. And, pointing out the overall stupidity of our fellow man, the site is hilarious. Take a gander at this entry:

This man has serious obsessive compulsive disorder - he's a maniac who screams at his wife and kids to clean up the house constantly. He makes his sons shovel leaves out of the gutter on the entire block -- both sides. He trims our trees and bushes and throws all the trimmings all over our yard.. and the worst part -- he digs all over his property, trying to find cat poop, and then throws ALL of it over into our yard because we have a cat. (He does not DNA test it first, nor has he DNA tested our cat to find out if it is OUR cat's poop and not waste from the other 18 cats in the neighborhood. The man is truly a psycho. I pity his poor wife and children.
Victimized09/28/2007

Now, would you want to move next door to him? What about this lady?

Just because someone is 90 years old, it doesn't mean they have nothing to do but to sit around and die. They could occasionally LEAVE THE HOUSE without fear of breaking to pieces. I had a teacher who still wouldn't retire at 89, my grandfather just bought a new house at 90, and there was a guy in my orchestra who was 96 and played with us until weeks before his death. Our downstairs neighbor also happened to own the building, so we felt we needed to walk on eggshells around her (or above her) and ignore her miserable stench. At first her and her daughter (the one who handled most of the business) and her son-in-law were nice, but pretty soon they showed their true colors as miserable, miserly, walking corpses. The daughter told us that she was nearly deaf, so that we should ring on the doorbell in case she fell asleep in front of the TV and it bothered us. So pretty much all the time she would fall asleep in front of her blasting TV at 1 in the morning, and the TV was not in the living room, but below one of the bedrooms. This was annoying to the point that one roommate had to wear earplugs, but we assumed that the benefit of this would be never getting noise complaints. When we started practicing with our band in the living room (no drummer and we kept the level of the instruments pretty quiet) at 3:00 in the afternoon on a Saturday she called the management company to complain that she was sick and trying to sleep. Wow, suddenly her hearing was regained! It's a miracle! And did she really have to call the management company? She owns the building! She could have just called us or rang on our door, and we would have apologized and stopped. But no, she wanted it to go on our "permanent record." From there on out any time of day (usually afternoon) when a stereo was on, she would call the management company and complain that we were holding band practice in the apartment without permission. I honestly should have complain about the stench wafting up from downstairs because it was vile. Maybe if we changed our music to sound like the laugh track of Everybody Loves Raymond she wouldn't have noticed.

The vitriole on here is astounding. Thanks to the internet, thousands of people can now avoid punching the wall in their bathroom. When you start reading these things, you can't stop. The potato chip of prose.

What an absolute joy it was living next door to Dick. A sad, old, pathetic and lonely husk of a man who compensated for these shortcomings by being an obnoxious, misogynistic, child-hating, male-prostitute hiring, petty and childish piece of trash. I can't remember which parts I miss most: The TV blaring so loud I'm sure it could be heard on the space shuttle at all hours of the day or night; the faked-to-make-you-think-he's-actually-happy-laugh during endless reruns of his favorite show 'Wings'; the homeless junkie piece of shit he hired to cook his dinners(!!) and sweep his front step who'd loudly sing Avril Lavigne so out of tune and so loud you thought there might be a constipated tyrannosaurus living through the wall; the glorious drug and alcohol filled parties aforementioned junkie piece of shit would host while Dickie was out of town; the aforementioned man-whore selling crack and who knows what else out of Dick's apartment; the boyish (Dick's only, like, fifty) stomping as loud as he humanly could up and down his stairs just to remind you he lives there; the spraying of the complex's garden hose through my upstairs bedroom window because I couldn't get a sick child to sleep; the abrupt blaring of his stereo if anyone spoke out on the courtyard so loud it brought the deaf lady four doors away THE DEAF LADY FOUR DOORS AWAY! out of her apartment because she felt it through the floor; the complete apathy from the management when informed of all this; the calling of the police three times to deal with his behaviour; the sexual harrassment of some male tenants; his ugly face; his stupid moustache; everything about him. Years later and I still wish him a horrible, painful death. Don't ever move here. Never, never, never.


Okay, one more...

Woman in this neighborhood that's aggressive, litigious and compulsive. Calls police for fabricated/trumped up reasons. Had a 70 year old gardener arrested for stepping on her lawn. Called Hazmat for neighbor emptying water into the street. Attracts and feeds rats - deliberately. Plays obnoxious loud music to discourage neighbors from using their yards. Reportedly peers in neighbors windows at night - not confirmed.

And one last one...

My neighbors have the noisiest f--k fests I’ve ever heard. Usually at around 8 pm to 11 pm. Could be any night of the week. Yesterday morning they started in at 7 am! And they always leave the window open! When the traffic dies down you can hear them out on the sidewalk. Until we realized what the noises really were, another neighbor and I thought they had a dog they were locking out of the house allowing to howl all night long. That’s how loud the woman is! We live in houses with maybe 5 feet between them and I can hear them through the walls. I really hate these people!!!!! They have their house up for sale. God I wish somebody would buy it! I’m thinking of leaving copies of the sale flyer at preschools & churches so I can get some neighbors with lower libidos.

Of course, you can rant on and on about your neighbors. Or you can take some action. Let me tell you about a problem we had out here about nine years ago.

When we were living in an apartment complex in Beverly Hills for a little while, our front door overlooked the pool area. There was an apartment directly below us that was essentially next to the pool. It was inhabited by a woman and two teenage kids. She would leave for the entire weekend to run off with her boyfriend. That left the two urchins alone to have night-long slumber parties every Friday and Saturday nights. We'd pound on the floor to no avail. It was extremely frustrating.

So, you can imagine my anger one Sunday night when I dropped a can of tomatoes on the kitchen floor. Two minutes later, there is a knock on the door from Mommy Downstairs.

"Could you please keep the noise down?"

Huh? She left so quickly that I had no chance to respond. But, my roommate had plenty to say when he got home several hours later and heard my story.

"We'll fix her ass."

Two days later, my roommate had to be working till 3AM. When I walked out of my bedroom to go to work, he had pinned a note to my door.

"On your way out, go see what I did."

In the middle of the night, he had taken every piece of pool furniture and stacked it up against their front door. The way it was all positioned, it would come crashing into their apartment as soon as they opened the front door. Neither of us had to be there when it happened. We could imagine the disaster. And that's all we needed.

And, apparently, that's all they needed. They moved out one month later.

Who needs to rant on a website? No, wait, I just did.

Dinner last night:  Sandwich.


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