Screech, Screech,, Whine, Whine, SLAM!

I have lived most of my adult life in apartment buildings, large and small. I am thinking of this tonight because my neighbors are fighting. Screech, screech, etc. As long as they shut the frak up before I go to bed, I don't much care.

In one place, the bedrooms abutted one another. I had to go ask my neighbors to please move their bed a few inches away from the wall, as the hammering effect was a bit much to take. The woman involved was also a moaner/screamer, but there's not much to be done about that. Saying "put a sock in it, lady" seemed a bit mean-spirited.

Alarm clocks are a persistent issue. In one place, the guy down the hall had grown up in a noisy place, so he was hard to wake up. What he had was a fire-alarm bell hooked up to a timer and when he woke up, everybody woke up. He had to come up with another (quieter) method of holding reveille on his ass before someone put him into a drainage ditch (wasn't me who threatened that, I swear). In another place, the folks below me had an alarm clock that went off at 5:20AM. That wasn't so bad, but they would hit the snooze alarm seven or so times. I finally complained to the apartment manager and they stopped. For awhile, that is, for they went away and set their alarm clock to go off at 5AM on a Saturday morning. After five minutes of BEEP BEEP BEEP, I went downstairs and pounded on their door. Nobody was home, so I went to the utility room, found the breaker to their apartment and killed the power. That shut the alarm clock off. I turned the power back on. When I remembered to do that. About fifteen hours later.

One place had a really noisy guy in a unit, and this was a large "garden apartment" complex. I went to the manager's office and said "my lease says that you guarantee that I will have quiet enjoyment of my apartment; well, it ain't quiet and I ain't enjoying it." They fixed the problem, but it wasn't until I went to law skool that I learned that "quiet enjoyment" had nothing to do with noise levels.

I lived in one high-rise that was made of reinforced concrete and it was usually pretty quiet. I loved that apartment; when it was warm out, I'd sit on my balcony with a cup of coffee and watch the sun come up. One evening, though, I heard the woman upstairs yelling at her kids, and that is the first time I ever heard a mother refer to her kids as "you little motherfuckers," which is really sick and twisted if you think about it.

Then there was the time I got a call from some guy at 2AM, who was convinced that I was messing around with his girlfriend. I replied with a classy "I don't know who you are taking about, fuck off" and hung up. He called again and started ranting at me; I told him if he really thought his girlfriend was with me, "come on over and you can take it up with my shotgun." I never heard from him again.

One of the two next door slammed the door, got in the car and roared off. Peace and quiet, once more.