Stupid Bitch

[Seshat]

Neighbors to my left have a dog that barks all day long. Not an exaggeration. Soon as middle-aged well-dressed woman closes the door of her car, it begins. It does not end until the car returns and delivers her to her driveway. So of course she never hears it. I think she's a little stumped as to what to do about it, actually.

The dog is lonely, bored, and yes, in distress. It's separated from its pack, it can't get attention or help ...

Well. Dogs bark for a number of reasons.
* We can rule out 'playfulness' in this case - besides, the sound of happy-barking is distinct from distress barks.
* It's probably not a territorial bark. (Hey! Mum/pack boss! There's people coming into our territory!)
* It's not barking to be dominant, because there's noone there for it to be dominant over.

However, here's some likely reasons:
* It's bored, and its voice is one of the few things it has to play with.
* It's trapped behind a barrier (the door, the windows), and there's no pack with it.
* It's lonely.
* Maybe it sees people or other animals it thinks it might attract who can keep it company.
* It might be stressed or uncomfortable (other than 'just' being separated from its pack).


To correct this:
* She needs to make certain all its needs are met, both when she's there and when she's not. Toys, comfortable bedding, fresh water, enough good food. Plenty of exercise and play-time when she's there, as well. Mental exercise too: dog training exercises are great, and perhaps she could start teaching him 'agility training' or one of the other canine sports.

* If he is barking when she comes home, she must ignore him until he stops barking. Yes, this is hard; on her, on the dog, and yes, on the neighbours. But until he learns that it's NOT his barking that brings her home, he'll keep barking until she gets home.....

* She can do practice excursions. Basically, she leaves the house and the dog's sight. She has a startling-thing set up, perhaps a can of pebbles that rattles alarmingly, and has a pull string that goes through the window and around the side of the house.
The dog barks. She makes the startling-thing happen. The dog goes quiet. It stops. Repeat.
When the dog has been quiet for the longest-period-of-time-so-far, she comes home! Dog is happy!
She is cheerful and pays attention to dog while dog is happy in an acceptable (not-barking) way; carefully and pointedly ignores dog (see above) if dog barks-to-summon-her-home.

Repeat practice excursions.


* While doing the practice excursions, she may also want to develop a 'leaving ritual' and a 'coming home' ritual, that involves acceptable behaviours from the dog - and from her. Behaviours from her that reassure the dog he's still loved and she'll be coming back, and behaviours from the dog that are acceptable to her and the neighbours.

We've taken to telling our dog the word 'handbag', to tell her that we're getting ready to go out, rather than to go for a walk. Also 'we'll be back' and petting her, just before we leave.
(Some dog trainers advocate not having a ritual: we've found that Vi ALWAYS knows when we're going anyway, and including her in the process of leaving seems to make her happier.)
Vi wags her tail when she gets petted, and then goes to the window to watch us leave: but she doesn't bark, and she just settles herself down in one of her favourite comfortable spots and waits. One of our neighbours says the other thing she sometimes does is go and get her squeaky toy and play with it!


On return, she's allowed to be excited, and she can have a short period of happy-barking (no more than ten barks, total) before we tell her 'quiet'. She's voluntarily shortening that herself - the price is that we get her pressing against our legs and whacking us with her happy tail. Which is just fine!

[georgie]

Pray for me, guys.

She had her baby today. Not sure how many days until she's back. Probably tomorrow or Sunday.

The neighbors overheard that her mother will be staying there nearly permanently after the baby comes home.

So, the last few months I live here, I not only get to deal with a screaming baby all day, but the door slamming to go along with it.

Kill me now.

Oh well. The neighbors have said they are considering moving as well. They moved here specifically because they never put people with kids in this building. They'll learn when they lose two of their long term tenants.

my only advice is to stop being polite. they obviously dont care about politeness since theyre pissing their neighbours off


every time one of them slams the door yell out "stop slamming the fucking door"
every time they start shouting you yell out "shut the fuck up"

believe me it works

im now only polite to those neighbours of mine who have earnt it. if youve previously been inconsiderate then dont expect me to lift a finger or do anything nice for you ever (EVER). out of the 5 neighbours on my street now i will go out of my way to help 3 of them as much as i can. the other 2? i might call the fire brigade if their house was on fire. maybe

[PepperElf]

Does pissing on the house count as helping put out the fire?


Although... you know if they scream and slam doors they're just going to wake the baby up. So maybe they'll pull their heads out of their asses.

Either that or yelling at them back will wake up the baby and teach them to stfu?

[blas]

I'm not going to punish a baby for it's mother and grandmother's sins. Plus, I want it quiet.

I don't think she had it, this weekend. She's still as huge as a house and I don't hear anything that sounds like a baby. Must not have worked, so that would explain why her mother is refusing to fucking LEAVE.

And it was hard to sleep yesterday and it will be today, too.

I went to pay rent, and I mentioned my problems with that woman. We will see if anything happens. I did note that I'm not renewing my lease, mostly for monetary reasons, but people like this are cementing the decision.

[Pixilated]

I'm so sorry to hear things haven't gotten any better (though I'm not surprised. People like that don't change.)

How much longer do you have before you can move out?

I never did talk to the owners because (this was in another thread) they came to check out my place (due to an issue they encountered over a year ago) and they were obviously still not happy with my housekeeping. I asked about a transfer because of the noise and the owner said shortly that they don't transfer people with pets (so ... why did the super show me the larger unit on the 7th floor??), so I am stuck here until I can leave. I've decided to wait and see which schools (if any -- cross your fingers for me!!) accept me into the Pharmacy Technician program. I've applied to two and want to apply to a third in another province, so I will suck it up until then.

I think he either gives his friends or perhaps a Significant Other (or both) access to his place when he's gone. However, if so, they are much more considerate than he is, so as far as I'm concerned, they are welcome to stay!

He doesn't seem to be home much. Don't know if he's on the road a lot of whether he's got an S.O. who lives somewhere else and he's spending a lot of time there.

But you still know it when he's here ...

[blas]

Yeah. Still no baby yet, AFAIK.

The door slamming has muffled a bit, but she still shuts it hard enough to give me a shudder if I'm sleeping or sitting down relaxing. She's still practically living here.

No van of doom today, and no noise downstairs tonight, so maybe they are at the hospital.

I am not looking forward to the baby coming.

[raudf]

Door slamming and yelling won't wake a baby up after a while, so don't expect that to cut the noise level down. It's amazing what a baby can and will sleep through. When the kiddo was a baby, he slept through bad thunderstorms, police sirens, and fireworks. Just blissfully sleeping until I wanted a nap

If you haven't already, consider finding a small but amazingly LOUD fan to keep by the bed. Or just tune your AM/FM radio to a "static" channel. Prolly won't drown it out completely, but it might make the noise less *sudden* and thus keep it from jarring you awake. I use a fan along with my earplugs and I get much, much better sleep with both going.

[Slave to the Phone]

I had some "interesting" neighbors once. They took a car apart with hammers. At night. They liked to fix their deck late at night. They didn't work, so they slept late every morning. Until I put drag pipes on my Harley and started riding past their house in the morning. The toddler would wake up and upset everyone. The nieghbors started going to be earlier and moved out a couple of months later.

[blas]

The property management company used to be so damn draconian and picky about who they rented to.

This chickadee and her kids (baby's here now), and some of the other random characters over the past year.....a lot of us here have had enough.

We get that right now, most people are forced to rent instead of own, but this place used to be decent. I mean, the rules were very strict, but it kept characters and bad people out (save for Sheriff, but that's because he has connections to the owners).

I mean, if I had typed this up over a year ago, and her neighbor had made that complaint as well, her mother would have been told she's a squatter and needs to get on the lease or leave, and she'd have a tick on her record (two and you're out, supposedly).

[Slave to the Phone]

Now that more people are forced to rent, I'd think that they would be even more proactive. Bad renters cost money. I'm quite sure that your neighbor is damaging her place. If they don't care enough to carefully close a door, will they care enough to clean the place?

I'm sorry that things have gone down hill so quickly.

[blas]

Well, they didn't seem too worried when I complained last week. In fact, I was pretty pissed they were making excuses. "Wouldn't you want your mother there to help you if you were having a baby?"

I just answered "My ma doesn't slam doors!"

It seems to be the opposite. The housing market crashed, they rent to anyone and everyone. Trust me, my other neighbors and I are disgusted the people they are letting live here. Especially when I was given the riot act for not keeping my apartment clean enough at a yearly inspection....well at least I'm not slamming my doors repeatedly!

Besides, after the complaint, it's like she figures she's still going to do it. She just slams them a little softer than before. Still rattles and makes noise when she does it.

Whatever. I hope after I move out this spring, other good long-time tenants leave as well. They can keep the tenants who don't work and have all kinds of people over to make noise in their apartments.

[blas]

It's been a while, so, I figure it's time for an update.

After I complained, the door slamming got worse for a weekend or two, she'd still hang around for days on end....then all of a sudden, oh I wanna say maybe a few weeks ago, she didn't show up for an entire week. I was so happy.

She did return, and for a couple of weekends, she'd only show up on Sunday, while I was showering and getting ready to head back to where my parents and bf live, and she'd stay until Monday morning. But...it wasn't so bad because she was being halfway quiet. The only thing that gave away her presence was that loud van pulling up and that initial horrendous WHAM of the door slamming shut.

Then a few days back, before I was to leave for work, I overheard baby momma on the phone (she is always outside on her phone smoking, I assume to not wake the baby), and she got a different job or a different shift at the same job for when she returns to work. And her mom will be the one watching the kids.

I didn't mention this before, but last fall, she had these two girls that somewhat alternated days to babysit the kids. They were probably my age or a little older, and never caused any problems whatsoever, were quiet and obviously good with the older kid because I never heard a peep from downstairs other than the occassional cooking or cleaning noise.

Whatever happened with those girls, I don't know, but I wish she would have kept them instead. Who knows, maybe they turned out to be theives, maybe her evil mother decided around the time she decided to take over and practically live here as well, she'd be alpha female.

So, great. My last few months living here, and the door slamming grandma is now a freaking permanent fixture. She's been here ever since Thursday, and now that momma is back to work, I doubt she's leaving.

[RealUnimportant]

Could be cost cutting, could be the kids have found better employment, could be they can't cover the hours... So many options.

I'd suggest fighting fire with fire, but that kind of thing tends to end with the originally agrieved party being the victim of the first complaint that management actually takes seriously...

[blas]

I figure, if the dumb cow can slam doors all she wants, then when I'm dressing to leave, I am putting my heels or flip flops on on the linoleum floor and not waiting until I get outside to do it.

Once again, immature and passive aggressive, but in a way, makes me feel better.

Also, in this time, I've also learned that I have a night shift nurse for a next door neighbor (few years younger than me) who woke up one day absolutely horrified at the door slamming. I had to tell her roommate what it was, because neither of them realized where it was coming from.

[Pixilated]

*snip*

If you haven't already, consider finding a small but amazingly LOUD fan to keep by the bed. Or just tune your AM/FM radio to a "static" channel. Prolly won't drown it out completely, but it might make the noise less *sudden* and thus keep it from jarring you awake. I use a fan along with my earplugs and I get much, much better sleep with both going.

This does work. I started turning my kitchen fan on high and letting it run all night, and now that it's warmer I also turn the fan on my a/c on. Also the fan beside my bed ...

Yeah, it's overkill (especially since these days it's QUIET over there; I'm wondering if somebody threatened his miserable life) but even the very few (and brief!) times he's had his music on comparatively loudly, the "white noise" made a huge difference.

Did I read in one of your posts that you're going to move, blas?