10:39 a.m. - 2004-08-30
The Bad Neighbor
The Bad Neighbor
The worst thing about living in an apartment is the close proximity to sub-human life forms. The building where BFRB and I live seems to attract a few of them, because it's dirt cheap. Most of our neighbors are okay. Sure, one of them has a bad habit of leaving her trash in the hall (bagged and tied, but smelly) for days at a time, but for the most part, they are nice people. Our landlord is pretty careful about renters. However, even she makes mistakes sometimes�
This all started about a year ago. BFRB's neighbor moved out. We barely noticed, because she was never there anyway�.she was mostly living with her boyfriend but needed an address to keep up appearances. However, when the new neighbor moved in, we rediscovered the meaning of the word annoying.
At first, he was just weird. He was a short guy with bad acne and one of those dwerpy little braided tail things on his head. He was not usually very friendly, except when he tried to hit on BFRB and brought her a snacky from Starbucks. When she blew him off (rightfully so, I might add), he became a complete asshole.
His transgressions included:
1. I was carrying a computer monitor up the stairs. We have a security door. You have to unlock it (it opens inward), which is hard to do when your arms are full. The Bad Neighbor SAT IN HIS CAR until I got all the way upstairs. I'm not saying he should have carried it (although I would have let him), but opening the door would have been courteous�since he was going upstairs anyway.
2. Door dinging our cars. Hard. And I know it was him�.he drove a white SUV, and my car has a BIG WHITE DOOR DING. Not just a little paint spot. A big, jackass opening the door really hard and fast door ding.
3. Bad cooking smells. Don't know what he was cooking, but it smelled like ass. Every day, we came up the stairs and smelled this nasty shit. It smelled like a diner after the breakfast rush on Saturday.
4. Super-irritating gangsta rap, loudly.
5. Flushing the toilet and turning the water on and off every time BFRB tried to take a shower�since he was next door, this alternately froze and scalded her.
6. The punching bag. We'd be hanging out watching TV or just shooting the shit, and kept hearing this horrible, repetitive thumping. It practically made BFRB's windows rattle.
As if the above were not enough to permanently inscribe his name on our shit list�there was Max. The pit bull.
It's not like he just called the dog and took it outside and play with it. Oh no. He yelled at it�both in the hall and outside. Hourly. Then, he and the dog would RACE up the stairs�.and he would be yelling at the dog for CHEATING. Our stairs are old, they're wooden, and they are very loud. You can hear when someone comes in and out. Usually, no big deal�they walk up the stairs and go in their apartment. But yelling at the dog and pounding up the stairs at 2 in the morning is not cool. After a number of these incidents, BFRB finally opened her door and told him to hush.
Our landlord is adamant that you can't have a dog in any of her rental properties. In an attempt to get rid of the neighbor without fucking up our karma, we devised a plot. BFRB called the landlord over to investigate a smell in her apartment (there really was one). We made sure, though, that he was home and being irritating as hell when she got there. She hears the punching bag and music noises, and knocks on his door�when he finally opens it, she sees the dog.
Well, she told him to get rid of it, but a month later, the dog and the annoying one were still living there and still being supremely irritating. So we came up with a new plan for not ruining our karma but making sure the asshole was kicked to the curb. I just put a note in with my rent check that said "do you know he still has the dog?"
When the landlord finally called, she said that she'd been on his ass for a month, and he kept making up stories about the dog disappearing soon. Finally, after months of this hell, she evicted him�and his replacement is fine as hell. Apology accepted.
