A tip on how to deal with noisy neighbours |
Posted: May 16, 2016 |
I am a mellow and a rather tolerant person, who avoids confrontations whenever possible. That is not because I am afraid of standing up to someone, who has, say, crossed the line in one way or another, but because I firmly believe that short tempered people die younger. Well, I am trying to be humorous here, of course, but this was exactly what I said to my new neighbour, when he was fuming over our small misunderstanding about noise, which eventually turned into a full blown war for a short while. To clarify things, the noise generator was my new neighbour, not me! Or to be precise, it was his wild drumming that was coming from his improvised music studio in his garden shed at various times in the day. Most of the week days, I worked from home, writing on my computer, and because the talented guy never technically broke the NSW Residential Noise Regulations, with regards to the “playing” loud music after 10pm part, I heroically put up with this nuisance for a week or so. He was younger than me and had just moved to this area in Sydney, so I thought that I should try to resort to my patience, at first, before going out of my way to play the inhospitable nerd, who had no time or understanding for the creative process in Art, that young musicians had. However, the noise that he called practising became unbearable. When I realised, one day, that I had been staring emptily at the white screen on my laptop for several hours, I decided to act. I went to talk to him and gave him several reasonable suggestions - from simply soundproofing his musical den (I even offered to help him with that) to moving his creative activity elsewhere altogether. His answer was the most obnoxious “No” I had ever heard. He was not infringing any laws after all. Well, he was, actually, because one could produce unreasonable noise during daytime, as well, but the point was that I believed that we could sort out our differences in a civilised manner. I did not want to turn into an informer and complain about the problem to the appropriate authorities. It was not in my nature. However, it was not also in my nature to plot a revenge on my prodigy neighbour, but I did it anyway. And I made sure that I went into action after 10pm, when my neighbour wanted to chill out and wind down. This incident happened last summer, during the school holidays, so I felt grateful that I could grab the chance of executing my retaliation, when my wife and son were away for a couple of weeks, visiting her sister. I felt confident that I was not going to disturb my other next door neighbour, who was a little bit deaf, due to his old age. I even looked on the net, as well, for inspiration and ideas, and to check how others dealt with similar situations, but I did not have much luck in finding a solution. Therefore, I meticulously concocted a long list of the most annoying noise producing devices and picked a couple to alternate between. I strongly believed that this devious approach would have the most adverse effect on the mental state of my stubborn neighbour. Every single night, I opened wide every window that faced his property and switched between playing repeatedly and loudly Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung” and turning on our very noisy industrial type of vacuum cleaner, despite the fact that our house cleaning was taken care of by a local company every week. This went on for a few days, until the guy came over one evening knocking on my door. He was steaming and livid. Coincidentally, he found me standing in the entry hall and holding the long and rather heavy metal pole of the vacuum cleaner. I was calm as anything, humming under my nose to Wagner’s tune, which was playing dramatically in the background, and chasing non-existent spider cobwebs in the top corners above the front door. I must have been looking vigorously mad and threatening, at the same, sufficiently armed with the long pole above my head. Jerry, my neighbour, stopped all of a sudden, looking slightly confused. He, then, burst into laughter. I laughed, too, we shook hands and had a beer in my garden.
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