Blog assignment 2

Disturbing Neighbors

I feel like a really old senior complaining about disturbing neighbors (I’m 22 years old), but my threshold level has been reached. We live in an apartment building with a total of six apartments. All apartments have separate entrance and have a nice yard. The house could look more attractive if the owner cared, but he don’t.

Anyway, we live next door to a single mom with one daughter. The little girl is like thirteen years old and seems to have the hobby of disturbing everyone else. I’d guess she is looking for attention.
My girlfriend and I live with my girlfriend’s mother, who at Easter this year has been diagnosed with incurable cancer. She really needs all the rest and calm she can get to live with the disease.

The disturbances have been going on for a while and we didn’t say or complain at the start. We thought it was a one-off thing and tolerated it, but clearly it wasn’t. We and our neighbors talked about it and chose to notify the mom through a note in the mailbox. This seems most fair; maybe the mother could talk to her daughter about it. The note seemed to work at the start and it was really calm and quiet. The mom thought we were ridiculous writing letters and thought we should tell it to her face. I still think this was nice of us; otherwise she would’ve had nine neighbors at her doorstep.

The weeks went by and we had peace and quiet, but then it started again. This time I told the mom to her face, as she requested before. I pointed out that it had been good for a while but now it was like before. I believe the mother works nights in health care of some kind, and it’s not easy to control the kid from work. When the mother is home there is peace in the house, but as soon she leaves the daughter starts. The other neighbors have talked to the daughter as well, but it triggers her to disturb even more.

She usually turns up the music for everyone to hear and invites some friends over so they can have a little fun terrorizing the neighbors. They shout and scream, jump and stomp at the floor like elephants, slams doors as hard as they possibly can etc. If we are outside talking to other neighbors they sometimes scream “screw you!” through the door and then slams the door shut. Very mature I must say, sometimes I think she is still left in the despite age.

For those neighbors who don’t have a fence round their entrance, they have started to do ding-dong ditch at 1-3 am. This I can tolerate at single times but they seem to do it regularly. I think there is a big difference between the kids today and let us say ten years ago. It is not comparable.

We see how it goes, but we’ve tried talking to them and it doesn’t seem to work, the next step is to contact the landlord. Hope it will solve the problems. The positive about it is that I got something to write about, thanks for that little girl!

/ The precocious student :)