A long time ago, in a kingdom not so far far away, I worked in the customer service department of an apartment management company. One of the lessons I quickly learned is that if you put a bunch of different people in the same building, some of them are going to have problems with their neighbors. I fielded a lot of neighbor complaints. Most of them were fairly standard: loud music in the middle of the night, leaving full trash bags on the porches, and the ever-popular Walking Too Loudly.
Every once in a while though, I'd get a truly bizarre complaint. I kept a file of these in my mind.
You can read the first two collections here: Don't Love Thy Neighbor and Don't Love Thy Neighbor Part II.
If you enjoyed those (or even if you didn't), go ahead and read this brand new list of how people fail to co-exist -- even more of the strangest tenant complaints that I ever received as a property manager.
- When I'm eating, my upstairs neighbor does jumping exercises and things fall from the ceiling into my food.
- Yesterday the guy who lives down the hall was standing in his apartment doorway hissing like a snake at people. Today he's saying he's a vampire on a broomstick.
- Almost every day a large group of people comes to visit my neighbor across the hall. They ring my buzzer. If I don't answer, they ring all the buzzers. Sometimes they kick my door. They pound on my neighbor's door and yell his name. The weird thing is I haven't seen my neighbor in weeks.
- The sound of weights being dropped on my ceiling occurs many times a day. My parakeet does not like it, nor do I.
- My downstairs neighbor is freestyle rapping. (complaint on voicemail, no address given)
- Someone is collecting boxes of scrap metal and storing them right in the middle of the laundry room. There are literally sharp pieces of metal sticking out of them, right where people pass by. And I can tell you who it is – they labeled the boxes with their name and apartment number.
- There are petrified chunks of dog poop in the front yard of the house next door. Can you let whoever owns that house know that they might want to clean up their front yard and tell their teenager to pick up after the dog?
- My upstairs neighbor has left me several notes that she can hear my phone ring and “it disturbs her.” My ringtone is just a normal telephone sound. I don't know what to do.
- Someone in the building cooks fish every day, and it stinks up the hallway. I think it may be the woman in 1B who sings opera badly. Maybe you could post a note about both?
- My bath mat got stolen from the laundry room last month. Today I found it in the elevator. It was wet.
- Whenever anyone enters the building the small dog in the downstairs apartment starts barking. Sometimes this causes the dog in the upstairs apartment to start barking. This causes the large dog that lives with the small dog to start barking. This causes the upstairs dog to bark more, and the small dog is still barking. They all bark for at least fifteen minutes, and that's if they start roughly at the same time. And that's on a good day! It's a madhouse of noise! I have knocked on the downstairs tenants' door and nicely requested that they stop their dogs from barking. They said that they are currently working on this issue.
If you have any neighbor complaints to share, I'd love if you told me about them. Strange neighbors make for the best stories! I'm thinking about doing a reader-sourced version for next installment of neighbor complaints. Post a comment if you've got any to share with us!
RentConfident is a Chicago startup that provides renters with the in-depth information they need to choose safe apartments. Help us reach more renters! Like, Share and Retweet us!
