Hell is Other People Part II
Dec 22
Regular readers may recall a little rant called Hell is other people? back in June. It was sparked off by an altercation with my neighbour, a boofhead who refused to modify his lifestyle the slightest iota despite the fact that our side windows are about a metre apart and our front two rooms share a wall seemingly made of tissue paper.
Every morning I would awake to a deafening SNNNOOORRRTTT!!! as he blew his nose in the bathroom; every Thursday night we would be woken by his child, who stayed one night a week, waking up bawling her eyes out because of some nightmare in the early hours of the morning; every evening I would go to bed with the sound of his TV playing too loud late into the night.
Finally, this jerk moved out of the rental terrace next door and we had a couple of weeks of blissful silence. Surely, we thought, we’d have better luck next time? A nice couple in their late thirties/early forties with no kids or yapping dogs? Is it too much to ask?
Apparently. Yesterday, the gods took their revenge and gave us everything we had before, but turned up the dial marked “Fucked” another couple of notches. A couple with two screaming little kids with voices like flensing knives. One woke up bawling its eyes in the early hours of this morning, pulling me out of sleep. They’ll be at home all day every day and I work at home. The father stayed up til 1am watching TV, but they’ve moved the TV one room closer to our bedroom now. The couple are sleeping in the bedroom next to ours and I can just about hear every time they turn over in their sleep. and – wait for it – the final nail in the coffin. 6am this morning, I’m awoken by a SNNNOOORRRTTT!!!
Sigh. Right now, we we’re looking at the expense of double glazing, sound reinforcing the walls, air-conditioning, and anything else we can find to get a little bit of our sanity back. And trying to work out what we did to deserve such rotten luck.
Tell me your noisy neighbour stories people. What do you do to stave off the madness?
Dec 22, 2006 @ 10:56:15
Pah! I once lived next to a bloke who kept three greyhounds in a concrete pen in his yard. Every Saturday morning at 7am he would rinse the dogsh*t out, scrub the pen with industrial-grade disinfectant and then hose the whole lot down the street right under my bedroom window.
…or the Irishman in Balmain who would come home hammered from the pub every night at 2am and put the same U2 album on full-bore on his stereo.
…or the Vibe Tribe in the basement of a building I lived in who held acid rave parties with full-scale sound systems on Thursday nights from midnight until dawn.
…or the bloke across the road from me who can’t seem to get through an hour on the weekend without using some kind of two-stroke or electrically powered tool.
I could go on…
Dec 22, 2006 @ 11:10:05
Please do Will, please do! It makes me feel better.
Jan 04, 2007 @ 11:31:49
Well my street is a long straight road with no speed bumps or other traffic calming thingos and it is the local drag strip. Cars roar down it at top speed every night and I usually wake in fright. Becasue of this my neighbour (she’s really nice – sorry) sleeps in earplugs. I don’t like doing that personally but um, have you tried it?
Jan 04, 2007 @ 11:47:58
Oh yes. My girlfriend sleeps with earplugs all the time. I find them pretty uncomfortable – I suppose I just have to get used to it though.
And even earplugs don’t stop screaming children at 3am …
Sleeping with them is bad enough – but sleeping IN an earplug. Let’s hope it never gets that bad. š