sucky neighbor

[Andara Bledin]

Ok, if the vet says that the dogs are not under-exercised or out of shape, then that should be the absolute end of it.

^-.-^

[Ratha]

I have only one sucky neighbor story, and I don't suppose it's as bad as some of the horror stories I've read here.

I live in a set of apartments, 16 apartments in two buildings, and a sort of courtyard between them. These apartments are small (they used to be barracks for the base nearby), and there's no real fence around the property.

When I moved in six years ago, the then owner was a pretty nice guy. Allowed cats, but not dogs because he'd been attacked by a former tenant's dog. None of the other tenants had a problem with this and everyone got along. Until the stellar winners that moved in upstairs. They were up at all hours, ran around and dropped things and generally sounded like a herd of elephants up there, playing video games at full volume, practicing electric guitar with amp (they played video game music on the guitar, which entertained me), and there were no less than six people in an apartment barely big enough for one person.

Now, all that I could put up with. No, the real trouble came when Loki showed up.

Loki was a gorgeous black and white pit bull, perfectly friendly when I first met him and whenever his owners were around. I wouldn't have minded his presence, except they tied him to the base of the stairs outside, with about eight feet of rope. Why was this a problem? He would go to the end of his rope and block the walkway to my apartment and bark fiercely so I couldn't enter or exit my apartment that way.

I know I probably should have called the manager or the police or something, but I'm not a very confrontational person. And I did like Loki, and the neighbors were very nice when we did cross paths (they even let me play with Loki's puppies* once). So all I did when Loki was outside was greet him, then climb through the scraggly bushes to get to my door.

They did eventually have to get rid of Loki, and they moved out soon after.

And just to point out, I have no problems with pit bulls. One of my mom's friends has the sweetest mixed pit named Xena, who lives with a Chihuahua and a Chinese Crested hairless. Xena sounds absolutely ferocious when people knock on the door or ring the bell, but once you get inside, she's quite happy to sit on your foot or demand butt scratches.




*Yes, I know I've said Loki was male, and he was very obviously male. One of my neighbors' friends brought over a female pit to breed with Loki.

[hotelslave]

There's a website I have seen on the news but havent used it. It's called rottenneighbor.com. I am sure our SC are all over this page.

[icmedia]

No dramas here, even though I live on a main road route..
People behind us are elderly and friendly
Neighbours to the left are quiet, very friendly.
Neighbour to the right is a Dermatology Clinic.

No complaints.

Be careful... your neighbors to the right may, in the end, turn out to be quite "flaky."


Sorry, I couldn't resist.

[MoxisPilot]

I'm sure I'll have news soon of the sucky-neighbor quality; the guy next to us is also American, and, because his wife and kid (and dog) just moved from texas today, and we share a gated plot of land (no fence to seperate the two houses), I'm anticipating lots of invasion into our personal space, but for now, he's not too sucky.

However, it's pretty annoying that he shouts to me from his kitchen when I'm in my kitchen (across the yard). Just because we CAN hear him...doesn't mean we WANT to.

He's also incredibly obnoxious as a coworker and friend, but that's not the point of the thread.

[Shangri-laschild]

Well the jerks next door to Lady's house moved out. They were replaced by a new family. They seem nice, though the dad is just a little bit creepy. The kind of guy who looms even when he's standing across the room. Lady's bedroom is on the outside wall right by their house and at least once a week they have a group of friends over and they all hang out outside for hours going into the night and well into the morning. One of their friends has one of the most anoying laughs I've ever heard. We've only called the police about 3 times so far. Lady will get irritated about it but is "too tired to call the police" so she now goes and sleeps on the couch in the living room. They also dumped a bunch of stuff in her yard but she cleaned it all up before we could call anyone about it.

[FormerCallingCardRep]

We have three sucky neighbors.

The first one is the old man that lives next door. He is just very nosy about everything that I am doing as far as landscaping.

The second is the woman who is renting the house on the other side of me. I have wireless internet in our house. Somehow she was able to get herself logged into my network hub and put a passwork on ti so I could not access my own internet connection. I had to reset the hub and I put a password on it so I can use my laptop.

The third is the worse of all. Down the street we have a family of blobs (every member of the family over 18 is at least 200 lbs over weight.) The Son has put death threats in my daughters locker at school. The Mother has had the nerve to call my daughters sluts and whores (this was when the oldest was in the 7th grade and the youngest was in the third grade), but has told her daughter that she would make a beautiful stripper. The day after I went to the school about the death threats I got a call from her telling me that she was going to file a liable suit against me for accusing her son. The only reason I knew her son was involved was the principal found the pen used to write the note (a green glitter pen) in his locker along with the remander of the torn sheet in his notebook.

[Boggles]

Our neighbour on both sides are very friendly people. We've never had any bother with either of them.

The neighbours opposite however are real pains. They have in the past rung the police to report me for disturbing them when I set off for work at 5am. Police ignored this as they also reported the milkman for being too loud and the post man for whistling aggressively.

They like to nosy in our recycling boxes and when the parents were last on holiday, took notes on how many booze bottles myself and the then girlfriend had got through (3 wine bottles in 2 weeks).

Apart from that, we have never really had any bother.

[Phantomgrift]

There's a website I have seen on the news but havent used it. It's called rottenneighbor.com. I am sure our SC are all over this page.

Take that site with a healthy grain of salt.
I occasionally browse through it and find that most of the "reports" are nothing more than grandiose nonsense written up by some fairly narrow-minded people.

There are a handful that ring with actual concern:
"These people threatened my family"
But the most are routinely mundane:
"The couple in the upstairs apartment have to much sex!"
With the rest serving as complete drivel typed up by folks who one would surmise think a little to highly of themselves and their property-values:
"These old geezers are fucktastic wankers because they sit on their porch all day and don't acknowledge me when I say hello!"

[Kiwi]

we had neighbours a while a go at my mothers house who would play music well into the morning (3-4am) every friday and saturday night. The local bylaws state music has to be off at midnight.
Mum tried to ask nicely, then started calling the noisecontrol people after midnight... nothing helped.
Then one morning we were having a garage sale and I put my stero in the garage and while we were setting up 6am or so I played broadway show tunes and musicals at full boom with the speakers towards there house.
Mum continued this every weekend after they had parties and wouldnt turn down the music
they would have just gone to sleep and would come and SCREAM out the window to shut the music off.... hungover are you... what a shame!

within a few weeks the music automatically shut off at midnight and all of their guests were made to go inside and the windows shut.

[DeltaSierra]

I've never had a bad neighbor (knock wood) but the Crazy lady who lived behind my Grandma's house was nuts. A few years ago a bad storm knocked down a tree in the lady's yard, and it knocked over the fence separating her and my Grandma's yards. Crazy lady demands that my Grandma replace the fence, even though it was a tree on HER yard that knocked it down. Grandma offers to go 50/50 on fence. Crazy lady refused. This went on for a while, then Crazy lady decided to build her own fence, one small 3-foot section at a time from different types of wood she was able to scrounge up from yard sales and stuff like that (it looked AWFUL!!)

About a foot inside from the property line on my Grandma's side was a beautiful lilac bush. Crazy lady builds her fence, and cuts a hole in the bottom of the fence and pulls Grandma's lilac THROUGH the hole. It was rather comical - you could SEE it was on Grandma's property, and yet there's the poor thing bent at a 45 degree angle, going up through a hole in the woman's fence so its flowering on her side. Grandma gets out her hedge trimmer and cuts the lilac bush off at the ground and Crazy lady goes ape$hit and calls the cops!!! Of course cops agree that Crazy lady can't complain and she has to replace the bush!!! Of course she never did, but thankfully she moved away this Spring.

[Jack7957]

The Son has put death threats in my daughters locker at school. ... The only reason I knew her son was involved was the principal found the pen used to write the note (a green glitter pen) in his locker along with the remander of the torn sheet in his notebook.

But it was the prettiest death threat she ever received I bet.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

Ohhhh, have I got a story for you. I'd forgotten about this until I found this thread.

We had this springer spaniel named Sadie. My dad had got her to be a bird dog. She was a fantastic bird dog, but she was absolutely neurotic as well. Drove us all nuts. When let into the house, she'd make a beeline for the coffee table, crawl underneath, and stay there until something excited her. Then she'd jump up while still under there, lifting up the entire table and knocking off everything that was on it.

Sadie was also an escape artist. That dog could get out of anything. We had a large chain link kennel in our backyard, and our entire property was fenced with the typical suburban wooden fence. That dog would dig under the kennel fence, get out, then dig under the wooden fence, and then run for her life down the road.

My Dad finally installed a cement floor in the kennel and that seemed to hold her for a long time. And then one day she got out---not sure how but my Dad thinks she figured out how to climb on top of the doghouse and then from there leap over the chain link fence. We were all gone for the day. She got into our neighbor's garage, where their teenage daughter kept her pet rabbit in a cage. Now Sadie was not a mean or vicious dog, she was very sweet and wouldn't hurt a fly. But she got all excited checking out the rabbit and and jumped up on the workbench his cage was on, knocking the cage down and that broke the rabbit's neck.

Of course my parents felt really bad about this, my whole family being animal lovers, and they understood the neighbors were upset. But the girl's Mother came over and told my Mother very nastily that our dog needed to be destroyed and if they ever saw it again they would not only shoot it to death, but make sure to do it in front her 3 small children (me and my siblings) to 'teach us all a lesson'.

My Mother was incredibly pissed off. She called the cops and told them what the neighbor had said, and they came over and filled out a report and spoke to the neighbor, who claimed that our dog was vicious and had violently killed the rabbit. The police had been called the day before, when the rabbit had been found, so they had the original report stating the rabbit had died of a broken neck when the cage fell over, and that there was not a bite or scratch anywhere on the body (i.e., they had not taken our dog. Obvious it was an accident, not the dog killing indiscriminately). So the cops informed her it was not nice to lie to them, and that threatening small children was very bad mojo. Although they encouraged my Mother to get rid of the dog, as it would only cause problems.

My Mother reluctantly took Sadie down and had her put to sleep. After that the neighbor would stand in her yard and taunt me and my siblings when we played outside. My Mother ran a Camp Fire group, and many of the other children saw this woman taunting us about having our dog killed. So the other kids were all terrified of her and would not go to their door to sell camp fire candy. One of the girls told her cousin who was a girl scout about her, and the local girl scout troop stopped going to their door to sell cookies.

A year or two passed, and we just learned to ignored her.

Eventually she called the local girl scout office because she hadn't seen any girls selling cookies the last 2 years or so, and wanted some. The girl scout office gave her the number of the local troop leader, and the troop leader told her the girls were afraid of going to her house because she apparently had a reputation for being mean to children. This woman then came storming over while were in the middle of a camp fire meeting, barged into our house and set into a profanity-laden tirade about how my mother was going around spreading vicious rumors about her. In front of 8 or 9 kids and their parents.

One of the Mothers piped up and said to her "Well Jesus Christ, if you act that way no wonder my kids are scared of you!" I seriously thought the woman was going to blow a gasket after that. She started threatening all the women with CPS and other random shit, and was so worked up she was practically frothing at the mouth. One of the girls got frightened, got on our house phone and called 911. So the cops show up about 15 minutes later, as she was screaming obscenities in our living room and our Mothers had herded us all into a back bedroom in case anything violent went down.

The cops couldn't calm her down. She was screaming at the top of her lungs, for the whole neighborhood to hear, about what an evil bitch my Mother was and how she didn't deserve to have children because of her penchant for vicious dogs, and how the other Mothers were all putting their children in danger by bringing them over to our house, and how she was going to sue my Mother for libel and on and on and on. The cops finally dragged her into a cop car and took her to the hospital for an evaluation. I mean, she was so worked up over this she actually looked like a seriously mentall ill person who had gone off her meds.

Later on she filed a suit against my Mother, and we had to go to court. Now my Mother is the queen of paperwork. She documents and keeps everything. So she had all sorts of documentation for everything that had happened, including witness statements from every single parent who was in the house that day, as well as the police report from two years ago where she admitted to the cops she had threatened to shoot our dog in front of us kids on purpose, and the paperwork showing she had taken the dog to a vet and had it put down, even though what the dog did was an accident. She also had a statement from the local girl scout troop leader stating that my Mother had never told her the lady was mean to kids, but that she had developed that reputation because the neighborhood kids saw her many, many times, yelling at us and taunting us about our dead dog. Therefore, the bad reputation she had was her own fault.

The judge was not amused. Suit was thrown out and she was ordered to pay our court costs.

Two weeks later a huge 10 foot cinderblock fence went up between our yards. We moved about 3 years later, but we never saw her again.

I found out years later, another neighbor had told my Mother that the lady's husband had finally had enough and put the fence up. He told her he understood she was mad about the rabbit, but that was no excuse to taunt three small children for two years over it, and he was putting the fence up. If he ever caught her yelling at us again, he was going to take her to the mental hospital himself.

Wheew! I'd forgotten how long that was. Now that I remember, I remember clearly.

[XCashier]

I found out years later, another neighbor had told my Mother that the lady's husband had finally had enough and put the fence up. He told her he understood she was mad about the rabbit, but that was no excuse to taunt three small children for two years over it, and he was putting the fence up. If he ever caught her yelling at us again, he was going to take her to the mental hospital himself.

Holy moly, what a tale! I think if I were the husband, I wouldn't have even bothered with the fence, just taken her straight to the asylum and had her committed. That woman was just out of control, plain and simple.

[blas]

And to those who are still convinced I am just a whiney bratty princess that can never be pleased by anything and think my Sheriff stories aren't a big deal...

The next time you're out having a smoke talking on your phone and you see your neighbor go running past in his boxer briefs on the phone with the police, waving his free arm wildly as the police car arrives......yeah........when this happens to you, you probably wouldn't like where you live either.