Borrowing Someone’s Wife Is Taking It Too Far
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“I lived in the suburbs with my wife and child. It was a nice bit of utopia. My neighbor and I were best friends. We watched games and borrowed each other’s things. One day I came home from work and he was ‘borrowing’ my wife in our bed. That is the definition of inconsiderate.”
Entitled People Don’t Care About Flooding
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“In an apartment I previously lived in, the tenants about us had plumbing issues. The landlord fixed it, replaced our bathroom ceiling, and we went on with our lives. A few weeks later, their tub started leaking again. At first we didn’t know what it was as there was just a ton of water in our bathroom. We spent an hour cleaning it up, texted the landlord there was an issue again and went about our night. An hour later, we heard water pouring into our apartment, heard their shower and put two and two together. My wife went up to ask them to please stop as they were flooding our bathroom and to please wait until the landlord can come in the AM. They told us no, it’s their right to be able to shower, and they flooded our bathroom two more times before the next morning.”
Don’t Tell Them It’s Raining
“My upstairs neighbors were so lazy, they only let their dog on to their back porch balcony to do his business. The inconsiderate part comes in where their balcony is wood slats which means their dog is especially urinating and defecating all over our porch and outdoor furniture.
We reported them to the office and it turns out the dog isn’t even registered with the apartment complex. It was a small comfort knowing they had to pay a hefty pet deposit and now they actually have to walk their dog.”
She Can’t Be Bothered To ACTUALLY Parent
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“I live in an apartment complex with a bunch of neighbors. They’re ostly middle-class professionals (nurses, police officers, accountants, HR reps, etc), and it’s mostly fine. My downstairs neighbor blasts music at weird times and it drives my boyfriend nuts, but whatever. The neighbor I have a problem with is the nurse downstairs and her herd of wild animals (kids).
Just to give some background, the husband drives a really nice Porsche and these two love to prop the main door open so they don’t have to let their kids in and out (and then just NEVER close it). Case in point, we had a stray cat get in and poop on the rug in the front hallway, just because they can’t be asked to close the door.
Anyway, today I was stopping home from my day job to feed my cats and grab stuff for job #2. I pulled in the lot to park in my designated space (has a number and everything), and her kids were camped in it. They’ve got a chalk set up and all their toys in my space. Mind you, there’s tons of unassigned parking around. Not to mention a huge park directly across the street! But no, that’s not directly in front of her apartment. Also, she had the main door propped open and was sitting in the doorway where she could enjoy the rapidly escaping AC from the other apartments.
She saw me approaching, knew my car and my spot, saw me with my turn signal on towards my spot, and still did nothing. Meanwhile, the kids were running in every direction (there’s 4 of them) and shooting nerf balls at each other.
So I pulled into a visitor spot since I was just running in. She didn’t look up from her phone, even as I was squeezing past her to run inside. She literally did not get off her phone during this entire interaction (minus the eye contact when I pulled in, so I KNOW she saw me).
I ran back out to my car, and as I was trying to back out, her kids were running around my car USING IT AS A SHIELD for their nerf game. They’re all 5-9 years old, so they’re barely even window height, plus all the ducking and dodging.
I was going to be late for work, I was so scared I’m going to hit one of them, and Mom of the Year was still on her phone. I finally snapped and yelled, ‘GET THE HECK AWAY FROM MY CAR SO I CAN LEAVE,’ and then remember my windows were down. The one little boy I made eye contact with looked terrified, but I didn’t give a poo at this point. They moved and I left, and the mom finally looked up.
The worst.”
(P) The Kid Next Door Had Destructive Aim
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“I lived in a rural town in central Texas as a kid. We had some new neighbors move into the house next door, but I didn’t really interact with them very much. One day, the neighbor’s kid came to the door and asked if it’d bother us if he shot his .22 off for some target practice. (Rural Texas, not totally uncommon) My dad told him it’s fine, go for it. We could hear the pops of his .22. Nothing loud or troublesome that couldn’t be drowned out with a TV.
After about 10 minutes, my mom, who was sitting in the recliner in the living room watching TV, jumped out of the chair, cussing up a storm. I mean, she taught my 17-year-old self new phrases and interesting combinations I’d never thought of in her rant. She looked behind her in the chair and there was a whole in the back.
She’d been shot.
She, still cussing, suddenly went, ‘I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to call the cops!’ Meanwhile, we kept hearing pops. My dad realized the kid was shooting at our house and ran to the back to shout at him. He got to the back door and yelled, ‘Stop, you little snot! You shot someone!’ The kid, who was maybe 12, dropped the weapon and ran inside his house.
My mom had called the police and told them she’d been shot. My dad decided that the kid shot his wife, so he was gonna shoot the kid. He went to the hall closet, got his .38 out, and made for the back door. My mother, who was still on the phone with 911, having told them she’d been shot, started to yell at my dad, ‘Donnie! Stop! Put down the weapon!’ Fortunately for the kid, he’d already gotten back inside his house, so my dad gave up before he’d made it off the back porch.
After a few minutes, the Game Warden showed up (yup, he beat the police there, rural Texas for the win). They walked the property and they found out the kid had been using a metal barrel for target practice, like an idiot. Then they found a half dozen more bullet holes on our property, all straight line shots to the kid’s porch. He’d been targeting our buildings. The one that hit my mom went through a tin building before hitting the house and subsequently, my mom.
When she got to the hospital, they checked, and there was no bullet in her back. We tore open the recliner she was in, the bullet had gone just far enough to hit her and break the skin, but not actually make it out of the chair. That recliner caught the bullet, and my mom just had a small hole in her back and some bruising.
The kid got a slap on the wrist and the weapons were confiscated from his house.”
Loud, Obnoxious and Finally, Evicted
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“I live in the back duplex with a yard. We usually got good neighbors. We were mirrored with other neighbors that have almost always been red neck people who don’t know how to live.
One guy had an on/off girlfriend. They both owned dogs. When they were together, the dog poop piled up at the double rate. They had buckets of poop when they did clean, but it reeked and there was more dog poo than grass on their side of the fence. When he went off to basic, she got a new boyfriend and had both dogs, but didn’t take care of anything else. The power got cut and I almost called the cops when I saw flashlights in the place, then decided that someone sacking a place wouldn’t put out candles, too. At the end of that summer, the poo was so bad, and the grass so neglected, that it drained poo water from their place when it rained and their snow was brown.
The dude also bought an extremely large, grain truck. He kept it on the street until the city forbade him. He then parked it in his driveway and it was so large, it obstructed the sidewalk. The truck leaked very badly. The dude covered up the oil stain with a box fan and a mattress. He sold the truck on Craigslist, sight unseen, to someone in another town. The buyer was alone and I helped him get it full of oil and loaded on a trailer. My neighbor never bothered to tell him that in dumps oil almost as fast as you could pour it in. The fan and mattress joined a pile of old bikes parts, bags of cans, a three-wheeler and pedal boat that eventually got high enough to reach the garage height. The city made them take that away.
The next dude, who we called ‘Psycho,’ cleaned up after the last dude. He told me that the place had to be gutted because the dog poo was just as bad inside. We were happy to have him because we didn’t have a view of dog poo for once. He came off as weird and told me he had just been kicked out of his brother’s place and played the victim. A week or two after he moved in, he asked me if I had witnessed anyone slashing his screen as he was sure it was his boss. That’s when he installed the first camera over his front door. For a long time, I’d make small talk or at least say, ‘Hi.’ Then he started cycling or having a rough patch, or claiming territory or something.
First thing is when he called me over to tell me he was going to kill my cat if it got on the lawn again. I told him he could yell or spray it with water, but he had made a threat to its life and that he was never to do that again. I responded by buying four large containers of crushed red pepper for him to use to keep the cat out of his yard. I also rebuilt the fence so the cat could not get through and tiled up the soil with kitty litter in it on the opposite side of the property from him so the cat wouldn’t bother. He then escalated the situation with a call to the cops saying I did nothing.
From here, I witnessed him complain to cops using the road in front of us as a speed trap. I witnessed a long argument with the cable guys that looked like it almost went to blows, judging by the body language. An ex-girlfriend got her stuff back with the aid of half the town’s cops. The house painters got some dried paint on one of his trucks from backsplash and he yelled at them so much that the owner resolved it by having psycho finish painting parts of the house himself. This was just what I casually witnessed, I have no idea how many other fights he picked. It seemed that with every new fight he picked, he’d add another camera. I know he had two over his garage, two over his door, one pointed at my yard, and one through the window. He sometimes took video of me watering the yard and I often had the feeling I was being watched. He never got any evidence of me doing anything because I didn’t do anything and the cops called me once to ask me to make sure my water didn’t get on his lawn.
He had a work truck that he drove almost exclusively. Then he had a custom car in the garage that he never drove and a custom truck that he rarely drove. Then, just as my youngest son was born, he bought a fourth vehicle. This was a huge truck with a V8 engine and no exhaust. He parked it with the bare manifold pointed right at our window and he had truck parts covering his yard for months. It was so loud that it shook things off the walls. It was a noise you could stand for a few minutes but soon it drove you nuts. Everyone in the family had to yell over each other just to talk. It woke the baby. I tolerated it for two months and then I called the cops on him. At first, the cops just told him to stop revving the engine after dark, which at this latitude in summer meant 10 pm. I had to get four other neighbors involved and contact a community resource officer to get him to put a muffler on his truck. The last time I talked to him, he screamed at me that he couldn’t afford it and tried to shake the neighborhood down for a new muffler for him.
Things were tense for two more years, but he was just evicted a month ago. The new neighbors told me he complained and caused trouble for the landlord and they finally had enough of him.”
(P,T) She Just Loved To Complain
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“My family has lived on the same half-acre of land since 1978. When they got the land, there was one other house on our block.
Years went by and the rest of the neighborhood started being built up. We have had some wonderful neighbors moving in and out. That all changed when SHE moved in.
Now I have to stop and let y’all know that there were four kids in my family and we were pretty close in age. We also had massive dogs. Sometimes just one and at one point we had five.
It was about 1996 when we got a new neighbor, a (seemingly) lovely, older lady.
We were having a surprise party for my mother a few years after our neighbor moved in when all of a sudden…a sheriff’s car pulled up to our house.
Our lovely neighbor called the police on us and said there was underage drinking and loud music coming from our house. Now mind you, the party started in the early afternoon and it was the early evening at this point.
So the sheriff came into our backyard (that’s where the adults were, us kids were playing with lawn darts in the front) and started to ask my parents questions. Now, my parents are chill and were calm. The sheriff saw that we don’t have any music playing and there was definitely no underage drinking.
Up until she moved away, she was always yelling at my mom or dad about the fact their ‘little hoodlums’ were causing too much noise and damaging her property.”
The One That Went Totally Nuts
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“I had an upstairs neighbor that, when I first moved in, was great. She was friendly and fun, we’d hang out sometimes, sipping cold ones on the back porch.
But then something in her changed. I don’t know if it was substance abuse or what, but she went crazy. Like, legit nutso. First, she accused my of hacking into her computer. I hadn’t and I told as much. Her response was, ‘It must have been the Chinese then.’ Uhhh, okay? Yikes.
A couple of months later, I woke up to her screaming bloody murder from upstairs. I could hear the wails through the floor. The wails were followed by her blasting music and it sounded like she had put her stereo speakers face down on the floor, aimed at me. I banged on the ceiling with a broom handle and she screamed again before stopping.
A couple weeks after that, I ran into her in the basement while doing laundry. She asked me why another neighbor and I had been sneaking into her unit while she was out, ‘I know you are doing it, I just want to know why! Tell me why!’ We were obviously not doing what she accused us of and I told her to just leave me alone. That’s when she lost it. She started screaming that we broke into her condo, poisoned her dog, and set up cameras. She went on to say that I was ‘shooting rays up into her unit’ and ‘cooking her ovaries,’ which is why she was screaming and blaring music that one time. She was trying to block the rays.
That’s when it got scary because she had obviously mentally lost it. I became concerned that she may do something really dangerous, so I called the police. There wasn’t much they could do, but they did get a hold of her father who realized what was going on.
Over the next month or so, she moved out, sold her place at way below market value and disappeared from social media. I’ve never heard from since. It was pretty scary for a minute there, though. I’ve always guessed that she became schizophrenic.”
She Let Things Fall Into Complete Disrepair
“I have two incidents with the same neighbor:
1. She has a somewhat big plot of land around her house. In that plot and adjacent to our front porch was a fig tree. Said tree was overgrown and had spread over part of our porch and the pavement. In summer, overripe figs would fall and since she never bothered to pick them up, they would rot and not only stink but after a while, they would turn into a slippery mush on the pavement. She ended up cutting the tree when my father threatened with a lawsuit.
2. She also has an old hut in her land and when I say old, I mean at least 70 years. It is in complete disrepair and ready to fall apart. Since the hut is also adjacent to our house, we always have to pick up stuff like wood and roof tiles off our garden. And as if that wasn’t enough, stray cats use that hut to jump on our balcony and fill it with poop.”
The Junk Man Moved Next Door
“This guy bought the land next to my house and converted it into a junkyard. That’s his business now, he sells metal scrap and for me it means loud metal clanking 24/7, even at night (because that’s when he burns wire to extract the copper that’s inside).
They crush aluminum cans at 7 am using their diesel truck, they just ‘run over’ all the cans over and over again instead of doing it manually. Noisey as anything.
And on top of everything, every time someone tows a car to sell it as junk, they leave the car in front of my house or our across the street neighbor’s house. Last time, I had an old rusty bus parked in front of my house for so long that I started using it as a reference for my address.
My super chilled neighbor complained once and this guy answered with a ‘the street is not your property.’ Complaining is useless because this guy pays a monthly ‘fee’ to the town’s cops to ‘stay out of trouble.'”
This Pool Isn’t A Party For Anyone
“The neighbor behind us decided to have a pool installed one summer. He works late shift, so he’d come home around 2:20 am and would do construction work/clean-up from that day’s pool work. I’d wake up to the sound of him hammering and knocking down the wood boards used to build concrete forms. He’d stack the boards by throwing them in a pile.
Also, when the pool crew dug out the pit for the pool, the bulldozer knocked down an entire 6-foot section of our wooden privacy fence, as well as knocked two other holes in our fence. When we walked over that night to talk to them about it, they wouldn’t come to the door. In desperation, I tried to talk to him over the fence one afternoon and he told me, ‘It wasn’t me that did it, it was the pool people. Not my problem, take it up with them.’
I ended up calling the sheriff’s department on him. The deputy came over to our house, talked to us, got our side of the story. Then he told us he was going over to the neighbor to talk to him. We heard and saw them talking in his backyard. A few minutes later, the deputy came back over to our house and told us, ‘Your best bet is to file a lien on his property. I explained all this to him, but he’s a piece of work. A judge will definitely find in your favor and it will teach that fellow a lesson.’
To my regret, we didn’t file the lien and paid to fix the fence ourselves. About a year later, my spouse went over to ask Fence Buster if we could trim our hedges on the side that faced his property. He refused and out of irritation, my husband said, ‘We should have followed the deputy’s advice about the fence and put a lien on you.’
Fence Buster answered, ‘What are you talking about?’ Then lied and insisted a county sheriff never talked to him about the fence at all.”
They Felt They Were Entitled To Do As They Pleased
“I lived on the second floor of a three apartment, three-floor house. We had neighbors who were ‘water stupid’ all the time upstairs in the bathroom. One even forgot she turned on the tub once and flooded our bathroom. I could deal with the water stupid.
Well, when they moved out, we ended up getting ladies upstairs who at first seemed nice. No water flooding going on and they pretty much kept to themselves. This lasted a week and then the fighting all hours of the night, banging, stomping all hours of the day and partying started in. One day, they were up there doing god knows what but the banging they were doing actually sent our living room’s ceiling light’s glass globe went flying off. My guy stormed to their door and one of the girls answered. He just held up the globe and said, ‘Do you mind keeping the stomping to a minimum, please?’ She got angry, started swearing at him and threatening to kill him. She went to slam the door in his face, not realizing that his foot was right there and the door handle ended up bouncing right out of her hands. This angered her even more but he just turned around and went back into our apartment. About 15 minutes later, the police were at our door because the girls claimed my guy threatened them. My guy told the cops what happened and the ladies upstairs got a warning.
Fast forward a few weeks. We went to take our one cat to get fixed, leaving our 15-year-old daughter home. We got back from dropping the cat off and our daughter was in tears. She had been cleaning the house for me, listening to music. Well, upstairs called the police on her claiming the music was too loud. It was only two in the afternoon for crying out loud but I asked my daughter to turn on the radio and show me how loud the music was. She was a teenager, after all, so music tended to be played loud. She did and it was quiet enough that you could not hear it if we were talking. I went and had a nice talk with our landlord. He did not believe me at first. Then he went to talk to them about it. They got violent with him and when he tried to leave, one purposely stepped behind his truck and then called the police, claiming he had run her over on purpose. They were evicted and gone by the following week. To top it off, they were so angry they were being evicted that they destroyed all the glass in place. They even destroyed a beautiful built-in display case. They squirted ketchup and mustard all over. Ground poop (not sure if it was human or animal poop) into all the floors. And smashed all the cupboards.”
“I Don’t Speak Crazy”
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“I’ve lived next door to the same people for around five years. One works the graveyard shift, so they asked me not to do any yard work on weekends until after 11 am or later. They’ve snarked at me for adding a hanging basket on the fence between our houses, have told me my porch light is too bright, have asked my help with their dog or getting their mail numerous times, and so many other things.
I work from home around 50% of the time and they know this. A month or two ago, they had a big tree taken out in between our houses. It was two straight days of grinding and sawing while I had conference calls. I didn’t bother to say anything. A week ago, they had their bathtub refinished and the big vent air hose was pointing out of their bathroom window and blowing air directly into my open kitchen window and back door. My office is downstairs so when I came upstairs to check the noise, my whole house stank like chemicals.
When I texted to ask if they would let me know about stuff like this so I could close my windows and doors before I’m mid-conference call or before my house was full of varnish fumes, they didn’t respond. Then one of them cornered me later and started yelling and crying about how my text really bothered her and how they are good neighbors and I had no right to text that to them. I walked away. I don’t speak crazy.”
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