Noisy Neighbors

I learned how to use the auto­di­al fea­ture so that I can call the apart­ment com­plex more eas­i­ly. That isn’t hon­est­ly some­thing I ever anticipated.

I ful­ly expect­ed to have some adjust­ments to make when we moved to an apartment. 

I’m a very pri­vate per­son. I’ve spent most of my life in sin­gle-fam­i­ly hous­ing, and I like it that way. We made a con­scious deci­sion to move to an apart­ment to save mon­ey to buy a house of our very own. I think I’ve spent a total of 12 months of my life at the very most liv­ing in apart­ments before now, and dur­ing both peri­ods I spent most nights with SOs any­way. I’ve lived in duplex­es for maybe anoth­er 12 months, and in one of those, I nev­er had a moment of trou­ble (in any mun­dane sense) with hav­ing some­one on the oth­er side of the building.

Hear­ing oth­er peo­ple mov­ing around does both­er me. Feel­ing a pres­ence that isn’t part of my fam­i­ly both­ers me. I’ve worked on that and can deal with it bet­ter now, espe­cial­ly since I know that there’s a rea­son for being here and we’ll only be here for a year, maybe two.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the peo­ple upstairs can­not under­stand that their floor is our ceil­ing. And they have a lar­gish 3‑year-old who isn’t sub­ject to any limits—or any rec­og­niz­able sched­ule. greyknight, god­dessin­ga, curiousmay9, jupiter­corn­wall and isar­ma can all attest to the fact that it fre­quent­ly sounds as if there is an ener­getic pony up there. The kid is run­ning around, jump­ing off fur­ni­ture, throw­ing some­thing, etc. at all hours of the day and night.

The day does­n’t nor­mal­ly both­er me SO much, but today things were falling down here because of the ruckus! And many times, the run­ning, jump­ing, and stomp­ing has con­tin­ued well past mid­night. That’s on weeknights.

The offi­cial com­plex pol­i­cy is that if neigh­bors are being noisy, we aren’t sup­posed to try to speak with them or let them know we’re unhap­py. We’re sup­posed to call the cop who lives here and have him deal with it.

Sam attempt­ed to deal with this the nice way. He’s gone upstairs and been friend­ly. He’s giv­en them gen­tle reminders. Last night at about 1 am the reminder prob­a­bly was­n’t all that gen­tle. In any case, none of it is working.

So last night we start­ed call­ing the “cour­tesy offi­cer” instead. I don’t know that he actu­al­ly did any­thing. Today, I’ve called the prop­er­ty man­ager’s office about five times. NOW, final­ly, they’re send­ing the cour­tesy offi­cer over, because who­ev­er is at home upstairs has­n’t been answer­ing the phone all day.

I feel like a bitch, but I real­ly think the com­plaints are justified.