Annoying Neighbors ITP

[Hbgplayer]

This thread is to rant about your neighbors-whether they be across the hall, two houses down, or even if they're a mile and a half away-in the relative anonymity of this forum, as opposed to facebook or face-to-face.

My reasoning for starting this thread: the people who live behind me!
I'm absolutely lucky to live where I do. I live with my parents still as I'm going to college, on 1.5 acres in Northern California. The people who live behind me, about 200 yards back, behind an empty plot, are in all other regards, nice people, certainly better than the folks who lived there before were; except for one major thing! They grow Marijuana for medicinal uses, all legal under California law, Prop 215 (Nothing further shall be spoken on the matter). They're permitted to grow a certain number of plants, 25 to 99 depending on who you talk to, per person in the household with a valid 215 card. There are multiple people who live in my neighbor's house, all of whom seem to have a card. So right now, the dozens of plants they're growing are just about harvestable, and man, DO THEY STINK! I've never partaken in mind-altering substances due to the career path I want, and now, I don't know how the people who smoke deal with the smell alone! Sure I had smelled it before, I had people walking in high in high school who smelled, but that was just passing wafts. Living with the constant smell for the past two weeks has driven me just about nutty! Even as I lay in bed at 1 am I can't fall asleep due to the constant eau de hemp.
Maybe I'll get to sleep now that I have that off my chest! And need to wake up in 5 hous. :smallfrown:

[Krazzman]

Ouch.

For me we HAD in my parents apartment/flat a neighbor (directly beneath us) that insisted that the rattling/movement of my hamster at night would distrub his sleep (I slept next to it and had no problem...) and that we should bind my cousing (he has ADHS[no not the fake-y one, the real one]) to a chair if he can't stay still after 18:00.

Else in our current flat our neighbors are pretty ok. The lady next to us is a police officer and on the other side we have some "polnish"? people that seem to like Sauerkraut pretty much. Else everything is fine... except that our puppy still doesn't really like to be left alone and makes a bit of noise then but no one said anything so far instead they complimented that she is quite silent.

[Haruki-kun]

I have some pretty terrible neighbors who get drunk on Thursdays and Friday nights and then knock my garbage can over on the way back home. And once they started banging on the window in the middle of the night and scared the crap out of my girlfriend who was there alone while I was out.

On a funnier note we had a couch that was left in our unfenced backyard by some previous tenants and was sitting there rotting. We were planning on getting rid of it soon. One morning we woke up and the couch had been flipped over by the drunks in the middle of the night when they walked through our backyard.

I can only imagine the sight must have been hilarious, as the couch had two wasp nests in it...

[CurlyKitGirl]

Aaah, we had an Old Cow or The Trout as everyone in our house and the houses either side of us so lovingly called the woman who lived in the house diagonally across from us.
We could understand her being a little grumpy because the drop-off point for bins for several houses happens to effectively be right outside her gate. That is still no cause for pushing our bins over or putting them right outside our front doors if they're still there five minutes after the binmen come around. At eight thirty. When everyone in our three houses would be either at work, at school, or is physically disabled and needs local nurses and the kindness of her neighbours to come around to do things like put out the milk, shop, cook, clean and so on. This last lady just turned ninety-one for the record. The Cow still pushed her bin over.

The Trout also used to follow school children up the hill (the lane to the other school runs parallel to her property for about one hundred yards) and shout at them if they drop a piece of litter on the public road, causing some children to cry, if you had a dog she would virtually stalk you another hundred yards past her house. If you so much as brushed against her hedge she'd shout at you. If our dogs barked (as dogs, and especially puppies do) she would come and nag. She called the police to complain that Bees (my autistic brother) was doing the criminal activity of sitting on the pavement under the lamppost outside of her house. If someone's cat did their business in her garden she would damn well follow that cat home and complain. She threatened to kick several cats.
We've lived here since I was eight, and by the time I was ten I was calling her the Trout/Cow. And if there's one thing my parents are very keen on it's proper language and respect. She and one other adult were the only people I've been able to speak so disrespectfully of without being told off until I was sixteen.

And the Husband sometimes looked really creepy because he was an amateur astronomer who also took photographs meaning he had a camera/telescope permanently in the front window.

But the Cow's gone, and the day we found out her house was sold my mum and the Pensioner Neighbour got stinking drunk because that festering plague on our local streets was going!

[Drakeburn]

Well, I live in a really decent neighborhood.

But that doesn't mean we have any bad neighbors.

There is a house next door to my house, and it isn't exactly the cleanest house around. It had a bad history of bad people. I remember when my family's 3rd cat wandered into the yard years ago, and some punks who lived in that house at the time declawed our poor cat with pliers, and shaved a spot on the cat's head.
When my mother found our cat the next morning, and didn't found out that something was seriously wrong with him until she discovered that there was blood from his paws on her shirt.

[What really pains me is that if she had taken photographs of the blood trail that lead to that, we could've put those jerks behind bars]

And I heard that some other owners (I cannot remember if it was before, after, or if it was the same guys) got arrested for selling drugs in the church parking lot that was on the next block.

The current people who live in that house have a bad smoking habit and use profane language (which is kinda funny, since my mother is worried that my favorite comic book store [well, the only comic book store in my city] would expose me to this sort of thing. So I'm just as exposed to bad language and smoking [and maybe drinking] in my own backyard. :smalltongue: )

And I took part of a neighborhood project to clean that yard. It was really disgusting. Cigarettes, beer cans and bottles, and we even found a shirt in the mess.

We have some neighbors from the OTHER next door who have a daughter probably around my sister's age. Even though that family is way nicer and cleaner than the other next door neighbors, that young daughter has been a pain for gosh knows how long. She comes over almost everyday of every week (probably exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea), she calls our house, and calls again a few seconds after nobody answers the phone, and continues the pattern until either she gives up, or somebody answers it.

She is an ok kid. I had a couple conversations with her and my little sister. My only concern though, is that a time would come when she would influence my little sister to do something that would get them both into trouble. Like, the kind of trouble where the police are involved.
But, she is a good friend of my little sister nonetheless.

There was an elderly couple who lived next to the awful house that is next to my house. They're really nice and all, but when I first met them, they knew some things about me when I first met them. In my perspective, that was a bit creepy. :smalleek:

[noparlpf]

I had some terrible ones in dorms. Who thought it was a good idea to let a bunch of teenagers out on their own? Had one guy blast music at four or five the morning, and I lived by the fire escape where everybody went to (illegally) smoke and drink. I had to share one faraway bathroom with two toilets and two showers with a good forty teenage boys. (The most disgusting showers ever, I might add.) The one fire alarm I was in the dorm for was at 2:30 AM in the middle of the winter, and my entire hall was smoky and filled with fire extinguisher stuff. Worse, they had run into the bathroom and stairwell, so the RAs locked off our bathroom and stairs for a good five days before any cleaning staff bothered to come by, meaning I had to go share the even further-away bathroom with about eighty guys for the week.

I moved out before the end of the semester before I started killing people. Now I rent a place and only have to deal with the landlord's kids getting loud once in a while and my one flatmate who plays guitar quietly every so often.

[Aedilred]

I'm between two families in my terraced house; on one side they're mostly fine although we have had some run-ins with them in the past. On one occasion they were having a birthday party for their children in the garden and another (as yet unidentified) neighbour took it upon himself to complain by posting passive-aggressive notes. He got the house wrong and posted two to us, so we took them to our neighbour in a "lol look at this" manner and affirmed that the noise wasn't bothering us. Since then though they have been concerned about our boiler since they sometimes think they can smell gas in their garden, and at one point sent an engineer round to disconnect it, which he did... in February. We had nearly a week of no heating or hot water in the freezing cold before it was reconnected.

The other side has a family who have moved in relatively recently and are mostly ok except for two details. Firstly, they never answer their door, which is annoying since the post office will often try to deliver parcels to neighbours if the target recipient is out. Often either they won't answer the door to the postman or they won't answer the door to us when we go round to collect. The other issue though is that one of them sings. Loudly, often, and not all that well.

By far the worst issue though is with the school opposite. Last year they substantially rebuilt the area facing the road, including a new vehicle entrance, complete with intercom so the doors can be opened remotely. Like many such systems, the intercom beeps at the gate end to let you know it is working and is waiting for an operator to pick up, but unfortunately whoever designed it didn't think to put this on a timer. So it will beep for hours at a time if nobody is there to pick up, as they are not in the evening or over weekends. I've complained once and the school promised to fix it, but all that seems to have achieved is to reduce the maximum duration from "indefinite" to twelve hours, so it's still perfectly capable of beeping all night and all it takes is one bystander to set it off again for another twelve hours. I will probably be complaining again soon...

Still, nothing overly serious, and most of it is at least merely annoying rather than genuinely problematic.

[Hogwarts9876]

Wow, I thought my neighbours were bad (they have all of their really loud, yelling arguments outside very often, and came over to complain after I played my piano at 8:00 pm once) until I found this thread.

[Mauve Shirt]

Pretty sure I became the annoying neighbor when I offered to parrotsit for my parents for a few months. Peeps and shrieks at 6 AM. :smalleek:

But we have a guy upstairs with a 10-year-old who is learning the trumpet, and a 2 or 3 year old who yells and yells and cries and then the dad yells at the kid for crying and it carries on and on.

The most annoying thing though is the large concert venue across the street. Thankfully concert season is almost over.

[warty goblin]

I live about a hundred feet away from a college town bar with a patio. Yeah, I can totally get to sleep before 1:00 AM on weekends. Yet another reason to look forwards to cold weather, the fratboy is a fairweather creature that lacks hardiness.

[Morgarion]

There's a house behind my dad's place that has a swimming pool. The lady who lives there hosts her trashy kids and grandkids and all their stupid dogs every damn night when it's above seventy degrees. He says they stay out there until three or four in the morning. They're always drunk and loud. I keep telling my dad he should dump a bunch of concrete mix into the pool when they're not around, or move his bedroom to the basement where you can't here them.

We used to live in the back of an eight unit apartment building that shared an alley with light commercial buildings on one of the busiest streets in the city. It used to be a lot of couples, but then most of them moved out and the building got a little weird. I got kind of a strange vibe from some of the newer tenants. Meth, maybe. I could never tell them apart, either - white guys with shaved heads. One of them had a weird girlfriend that might have been a stripper or something. And there was a guy who was always picking her up and dropping her off who also called her his girlfriend. She always seemed like she was messed up or coming down off something hard.

Nonetheless, it was certainly quieter than our new place. I think being across an alley from the parking lot of a building that closes in the evening . There's a bunch of dumb college kids living on the street that cause a problem every weekend. Every damn weekend. There's this vain little girl in the basement whose drunk boyfriend screamed at her for two hours in the middle of the night because she didn't come pick him up from the bar two blocks away. I wish I'd called the cops that time, but they've chilled out since then. I think the landlord gave them a warning.

A couple weeks ago, half a dozen of these kids were coming back from a bar and they - being brilliant and drunk - shouted an invitation from the street to smoke weed to one of the apartments in the building next door. A couple minutes later, there was a cop car sitting in the driveway with its lights on. I hope the little buzzard duckers realized that there are, in fact, other people around and if they don't want people messing with their stuff, they have to keep it to themselves.

[comicshorse]

Our next door neighbours are fine at the moment apart from occasionally getting Skype calls very early and having the volume set very loud.
The last lot though. Their parties would start at midnight friday and go on until 2 and thats not 2 A.M. that's 2 P.M. ! there would then be a 8 hour break and they'd start up again Saturday night until about noon Sunday. The Sunday party would only usually last until 4.00 A.m.
I was in the habit at the time of visiting friends in York for the weekend and looked forward to those weekends as sleeping on their kitchen floor was the closest I'd get to decent sleep on weekends.
They neighbours were students so we only had them for one academic year but god it felt like a long time

[Traab]

My neighbor is an old fat man who likes to spend all summer wearing nothing but a pair of cutoff shorts and talking on the phone in his backyard. He also finds it amusing to, every time my dog goes outside, to taunt it into a barking frothing frenzy until I have to go out there and drag him back in because this idiot wont knock it off. My neighbors across the street have an even bigger dog than mine that they keep on a very short lead and leave on the porch to bark for a half hour at a time without a break. The thing is also crazy vicious in that if you get too close to "his" yard, his fur goes up, the snarl comes out and you would think he is trying out for an off broadway run of Cujo. This is after their last dog bit me when I tried to help them catch him. Tore open my hand pretty good. Then we discovered that not only did it NOT have its rabies shots, they tried to have it destroyed before we could get it seized and tested.

[Elemental]

Hmm... My own neighbours are pretty good. There's the guy across the road and the left who listens to loud music, but he has a nice dog so I don't mind. And then there's the people behind and to the right who like to get together and watch the football, but that's not a particularly regular occurrence...
All in all, I appear to live in a quiet suburb.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

My findings for life are...if you don't have problem neighbors...you are usually the problem neighbor. :smallfrown:

[FlapjackStudios]

Smoking. It's smoking. No matter where I live, or what apartment, where ever, the next door neighbors, be it across the hall, or right next door, always smoke. Not just a puff on the deck, I'm talking whole packs! And there's always a nice little draft to bring all that stale smoke right under the doorway. That is annoying.

[RandomNPC]

We've got a few minor ones.

The guy next to me is a yard nut. His flower garden in front is set an inch deeper than his yard, so it becomes a pond with any notable amount of rain. He likes to cut the grass two or three times a week, and if I haven't done so it three days or so he cuts the grass in front of my place between the street and sidewalk, makes my place look silly. So I dropped my mower down as far as I could and cut the grass two days after him so mines much shorter, but I don't mow anywhere near as often, I like the look of long grass and it takes a while to get there from how short I cut it. I figure he could probably complain about me as much as I go on about him.

The kids cutting through my yard. The girl living behind us likes to ride her bike with friends and to get to one kids place she cuts across my lawn. After a bike path was worn in my yard the police were called about it, we now have the agreement that by herself a few times a day on foot is fine, but no bikes and no large groups.

The annoying one. There's this kid with an evil streak, snarky, disrespectful, annoying, you know the type. He wants to play with my kid every day, right after school. Well, we know if you don't do your homework after school we probably will forget it before bedtime, so I tell this kid it's homework time. (He usually shows up for that or dinner time) and every day for a week he had something smart to say about how it's always dinner time, one day he stepped into my home (I, holding the door half open, was not amused) saw my kid with half a cheeseburger, and told me I was making things up. Then he didn't show up for a week, when he asked to play I said he wasn't allowed. He asked why, and kept acting confused, took about two minutes to get him to accept that I didn't like his attitude and didn't want him around.

[Ravens_cry]

My apartment has fairly thin walls. Also, my bedroom and that of the apartment next to mine I believe. are right next to each other.
Let's just say the occupants next door were amorous. No more than typical, I suppose, but the noise problem got worse nine months later . . .

[Jaycemonde]

I'm not really going to tell the full story because I'm not really awake enough to remember all of it, but my neighbors up until the start of this last year were terribad.

The crazy lady that lived next door to us tried to sue us for 'emotional damages' and make us pay for a concrete wall when Hurricane Ike blew our fence into her yard (I shouldn't have to say that nobody else tried to sue their neighbors for the exact same thing).

The family next door started out as always being drunk, then always fighting.

The next family (after the previous one moved out) was just completely insane. The mother was psychotic and the son--who was a beautifully talented artist, until he ended up smoking weed and losing all interest in anything around him--was always getting into trouble because of random *******s he made friends with that would try to threaten people.

Once a guy across the street got mugged in his own driveway. The guys who did it even tried to break into our Jeep once, until they found out the hard way we had a combat shotgun--nobody was hurt, but needless to say they've never tried breaking into our stuff again.

Then you've got the ubiquitous cars with washed-out, crappy bass. If you're going to listen to loud music I have no problem with that, being both an insomniac and a musical aficionado myself--just please, PLEASE invest in a real sound system.