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This is a joke right?
Yes, it is. But if it weren’t, it would explain several of the upstairs neighbors I’ve had.
I think I lived in that building when I was a student. Just add an wannabe opera singer and her insane manager.
During my first or second year of university (I think second, because first year was the year I lived across from a drug dealer who stank up the building with marijuana and stale take-out food), I lived on the floor below people who thought it was a good idea to play Frisbee at 3 a.m. in the hallway, on a school night. Normally, Frisbee is a relatively quiet game, but these individuals decided to SLAM the Frisbee down on the floor, and try to catch it on the rebound, because apparently, playing Frisbee the regular way wasn’t challenging enough. I think alcohol might have played a role in the invention of Nocturnal Rebound Frisbee (which, incidentally, would be a great name for a band), but it only happened that one time, because I called the R.A., who made them stop. Maybe that was a jerk move on my part, but I really don’t see how their desire to slam a Frisbee on the floor at 3 a.m., should supersede my entire floor’s need to sleep. The building was divided into blocks, with three floors in each block, and the noise was on the third floor, so it only really affecting maybe eight people (or, sixteen if the people on the first floor could hear it too), but I still thought that that was a good enough reason to speak up. On the other end of the spectrum, there was a girl who lived in the “24-hour quiet” residence (everywhere else, quiet hours were 11 p.m. to 9 a.m. on weekdays, and 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. on weekends, with longer quiet hours during exams), and she CALLED SECURITY every time the girl living next to her flushed the toilet after 9 p.m. (it was a bog-style residence, with pairs of single rooms each sharing a small bathroom). I think there’s a lot of middle ground between “normal living noise” at 9 p.m., and playing loud outdoor games indoors at 3 a.m.
@Anonymous: Didn’t “Nocturnal Rebound Frisbee” open for Guns n’ Roses in ’87??? 😉
@Just4Kicks: I wouldn’t know; I didn’t make it out to a lot of concerts that year, because I was too busy learning how to use scissors.
Well, damn that just makes sound so old….which I am. 🙂
@just4kicks: Yeah, but not their original, short-lived line up. They had Stuart Sutcliffe on bass back then.
What a gentleman. THIS guy gets it.
Best joke I’ve heard all day.
I love it…as a longtime “downstairs neighbor,” I can relate! “What IS that? It sounds like they’re rollerskating…at 3 AM…but I’ve seen that place, there’s no way it’s big enough and they have carpet up there…right?”
Pretty sure my upstairs neighbor and his girlfriend have been engaged in a passive aggressive fight over the toilet seat for the past year. You can hear the water run through the pipes (not annoying) every time they flush and immediately hear the toilet seat smack down (yup that’s the annoying part). Water running = easy noise to tune out, toilet seat smacking down at 3 am = wakes you from a dead sleep.
The previous upstairs neighbor was a heavy walker. So I knew exactly where he was in the apartment any time we were both home (apartments at each level have the same floor plan). When I finally met him, it was a 300 pound man. Touche, you are a heavy walker because you are a heavy man. But this video, hilarious!!
I weigh over 300 pounds and have adopted a light walk so people below me can hardly tell if I’m there or not. On the other hand I know a 100 pound woman who sounds like she stomping around throwing a tantrum, always…
I live in a townhouse (attached on all sides) and I can attest that size has nothing to do with footsteps. The person behind me has a small child and it sound like an elephant is running up and down the stairs lol
Our ten-pound Havanese sounds like an elephant when he runs. It’s like he doesn’t even try to be quiet.
I agree, the heaviest walking upstairs neighbor I ever had was a very slender built man, I could never understand it until one of my children, a six year old who currently only weights 42 pounds, was born. When he is upstairs from us, it sounds like a herd of buffalo….even when he’s walking and not running. Some people are just heavy walkers.
One of my sisters-in-law walks on her heels. She’s not a big woman, but she certainly makes a lot of noise. And she wonders why she’s had to have her knees replaced – twice.
@PrincessButtercup: Terry Pratchett mentioned in one of his books (I forget which one, but it may have been Maskerade) that heavy men often move lightly on their feet. I have a (female) friend who that applies to as well. I think it’s more to do with personality and habit, rather than weight, whether people tend to move lightly, or stomp around like a herd of elephants.
I’ve been massively heavy and normally sized, and as the heavy person learned to walk lightly. More like walk with balance. You normally wouldn’t hear me walk up behind you. I kept the way of walking so whether I’m at doctor approved gravity affinity or enough ballast not to blow away in a windstorm, I still walk the same. Heavy people often (but not always) learn to walk ‘lighter’ and it’s in my case the balance thing.
@NostalgicGal: That actually makes a lot of sense. Different reasons for different people, I suppose? I’ve been underweight, overweight, and normal in my time, but I’ve tended to walk lightly since I was young, in my case because of an interest in natural history. You can’t go stomping and bellowing through a nature reserve! (Well, you can, unfortunately, and some people do), but I definitely hear you on the walking up behind people thing. I’ve taken to clearing my throat if I think someone hasn’t heard me approaching, as it saves them going “Bah!” and jumping out of their skin, lol 🙂
We were the “upstairs” neighbors, and our landlords lived below us. We were always courteous, so we were shocked when they’d complain about the “stomping”. One night my roommate, who was by NO means large, in fact, she was a very trim girl, decided to chat with them. Turns out they had figured out it was her that walks heavy on her feet (due to our very different schedules for work it was easy to figure out). She decided she’d walk on her toes, and figured she’d get some calf toning while at it. It worked, no complaints, and her legs were rockin’! 🙂
Not always the larger people that are the “heavy walkers”.
My older brother is average size for a guy his height but he is the loudest walker ever. my family has always attributed it to his flat feet. STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP
I’ve always thought the person above me was practicing how to move furniture while tap dancing, but maybe it was so much more!
Moving furniture while tap dancing? I think we have the next big entry for ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.
I remember a night my downstairs apartment began to vibrate violently. I thought it was an earthquake at first, but most earthquakes are not accompanied by an ominous humming sound. This went on for fifteen minutes. I finally called upstairs and asked my landlady what was going on. Her entire response: “Oh, that’s just Dave.”
Never did find out what Dave was doing.
My boyfriend is a dancer who lived in a second story apartment. He was learning how to tap dance and we used to joke that he was going to drive his neighbor insane.
He only did it during daytime though. And especially when he knew she was at work.
@ April Obe: “My boyfriend is a dancer who lived in a second storey apartment”. Admittedly I’m in a particularly silly mood today for some reason, but that sentence had me howling with laughter 🙂 Kudos to your boyfriend for trying to be considerate, but thanks for the chuckle!
Right now I am glad that I am a downstairs neighbor. My cat will run like a madman in the apartment at weird hours and I swear he has little lead feet.
@Inelson 1218: Our cat does this too, usually around 2/3 am….drives me bonkers.
We live in a 100 year old farmhouse, and I swear there is a ghost that hangs out at the top of our staircase some nights.
Finley will refuse to go from our bed where she usually sleeps (until 2am when she’s downstairs chasing God-knows-what) into the hall to the litter box in the upstairs bathroom….instead she will go through our room, into our daughter’s room who shares a door with the bathroom.
That was hysterical! I can understand why things sound like that. Fortunately, I’ve only lived in upstairs apartments. I tried to be as quiet as possible.
However, my husband lived a basement studio in an apartment building once. The noises in that place were insane.
Ugh, I think I would burn the place down! (lol, totally joking)
Very funny, I got a good laugh out of this. 🙂
The lady upstairs that typed (with a manual typewriter) for money, and would start about 5-6 am and go for awhile.
The one with the three thousand pound rabbit they would let out to exercise at weird hours…
And the one across the hall that would turn their stereo on loud about noon for half an hour (up against the adjoining wall to my bedroom) while I had to sleep days because I worked nights. I started having a beer after work at 4 am and having a self led concert (singing and not caring about being on key) for about two beers worth. No stereo, no followup concert. They learned that one quick.
I got to hate having neighbors over me, I could stand stereos drifting upwards but, finally went to renting top floor units only for a reason!
Wow, Nostalgic Gal, I´d throw you in ehell for that. There´s nothing inherently rude about playing one´s stereo in the middle of the afternoon. The unfortunate circumstances were your sleep schedule and the stereo placement. Surely you could have spoken to your neighbor about the latter, if you had already exhausted white noise and earplugs.
This reminds me of an episode of How I Met Your Mother, wherein upstairs neighbors’ activity was euphemized as “playing bagpipes.”
JWH: I thought of that, and also the very cranky “Mr. Heckles” on “Friends”, who would bang on his ceiling with a broom when the kids were being too loud.
Our neighbors play music with a really heavy base. I think there were things rattling off our shelves.
I once had the “heavy bass” neighbors – they were across the way from me. One day I finally had it with them. After warning the other people in the courtyard area who were also annoyed by the constant bass I engaged in battle. I had better speakers and Lebanese Opera. They learned to keep it down.
I should note that they had been asked nicely by all the residents to please keep the music to a reasonable level but they refused, and the landlord didn’t care.
I had upstairs neighbours 18 years ago and there were the usual noises, and music on weeknights at 3 am (“We’re having a party.” “Really? I have to work tomorrow.”)
But there was one noise that still plays in my head and puzzles me. It sounded like a bowling ball dropped on the floor and immediately splitting into tiny granular pieces. It drove me CRAZY!!!!
Sounds like a projection TV shorting out and shutting off. I had a TV that decided to do that. It took a major disassembly and some careful sweating on resoldering a broken trace on a circuit board and removing a capacitor and replacing it. All in zero space to spare. When it went out it would go boom (like a bowling ball hitting) then a disintegrating crackle and nothing.
I’ve had upstairs neighbors like that before. Of course, they had kids, which explained the noises. Especially around 6pm when the parents would have a dance party with the kids in the (wood-floored) living room to wear them out for bedtime. While it really did often sound like bowling balls, my husband and I never complained because they never did it during quiet hours and he and I didn’t have to work nights so we weren’t trying to sleep during the day.
But I will say I have no patience for the downstairs neighbors who can’t handle reasonable living noise during normal daytime hours when they aren’t trying to sleep. Right now we have downstairs neighbors who complained to the housing office on us, claiming our kids were “running around at all hours of the night.” The kids go to bed at 7:30, and my husband and I both walk quietly, so we have no clue what sounds the neighbors are complaining about. Someone else in our complex has downstairs neighbors who constantly complain about them, saying similar things when their boys are in bed by 8pm and the parents are being as quiet as humanly possible. Quiet hours for our complex start at 10pm.
And similarly, in a previous complex we had some friends who’d just had a new baby (second child). Because their previous baby had frequently woken up crying in the middle of the night, the new parents gave their downstairs neighbors a peace offering of advance apologies and earplugs. The downstairs neighbors still took offence to crying in the middle of the night and complained to the housing office multiple times.
I once amazed the couple in the apartment above me because though I’d never been in their place, I knew they had a rocking chair. They had never noticed how the floor squeaked when they rocked. Creak, creak, creak. It was enough to make a person scream. In college I had a room on the third floor of my dorm. The fourth floor housed athletes. I was under a basketball player’s room. Oh, the dribbling! It nearly drove me to madness because I was sleep deprived. The rudeness, the rudeness…
In one of the connected all male dorms in my complex, middle floor pair had issues with being too loud too long too late too often and their taste in music was best described as half strangled alleycats in a fight with a bass. The ones around them actually got RA permission to teach them a lesson. Every other room had the phone jack and the adjoining tapped the jack, so. They didn’t have the jack in their room. The windows were these huge plate glass things and sort of louvered shutters, very heavy and you maybe could stick a flat hand through them, on the outside that closed the screens. The phone jack piggyback was pulled, their door pennied shut, and the biggest baddest speakers that could be borrowed, and trust me they had no shortage of that or loaned out decent stereos. Room below built stacks and put speakers against their ceiling, the room above laid them on the floor, and the other two sides cleared stuff and rammed the walls. They started out with Ride of the Valkaries, to make sure they were awake, then fed them an assortment of synchronized classical music all day. Friday night a few had made sure they had food and drink in room (aka cube fridge and leftover pizza) and they were stuck in that room.
Days before cellphones. They managed to pop their screens and hung a sheet out with HELP on it and they WAVED FRANTICALLY at everyone as they went past. Everyone waved back to them, and cars honked.
There were a few keeping track of this and making sure they weren’t in any real trouble, and finally about 6 that night they got released. I’m not sure what Campus Police got told but they got left in there for about 10 hours. When the pennies were popped, all the stereo equipment was GONE. They learned the lesson about quiet hours and their taste for TOO LOUD music.
That’s just …beautiful. Beautiful. I wish we could have performed a similar schooling when we had an upstairs neighbour with super woofer speakers and a taste for the loud.
So glad my upstairs neighbor finally moved. She would randomly vacuum for at least an hour starting at 1am. I’d be in a sleep haze and figure that she’s going to stop any minute now, so no need to get dressed and march upstairs, right? ‘Any minute now’ always turned into an hour. And what was she vacuuming for that long anyway? All the apartments have hard wood floors.
Yarnspinner, sounds like you were experiencing sexquakes (coined this very second): no identifiable sex noises, just earthquake-like rattling. I’ve actually checked online in the midst of one of these to see how close the quake hit, only to realize the epicenter was just upstairs. As for the humming sound, well…
I don’t think I’d mind vacuuming too much. When I was a kid I’d lie in bed in the morning listening to my mum vacuuming downstairs, and now I associate the sound with feeling safe and comfortable.
Unless your cohort from upstairs condo gets assigned parking right below your bedroom window and spends 1-5 pm every Sunday running a vacuum cleaner through their car. They would drag it out there, plug it in, turn it on and leave it run. No lovely afternoon nap on a day off. That car he kept showroom nice but the 20 min he really was vacuuming the car, I wish he would have done at the END and left the vacuum off until then. Yes I timed it. A very polite note nicely written and put under his door didn’t get any results. We didn’t have a couch and the Morris Chair that was awesome for curling up in, you couldn’t nap in it.
I was the upstairs neighbor once. I worked evenings and my downstairs neighbor worked days. She didn’t like the fact that I didn’t go straight to bed the moment I got home. Her biggest complaint….I walked around. Not thudding…the floor just creaked when someone walked around. She announced in a loud voice once to her friend (we bumped into each other in a social situation) that I was the one who had very loud “scrabble” sessions and she could hear the bed squeak. Not voices, just the bed squeaking. I had carpeted floors, even in the bathroom…how on earth….and it wasn’t scrabble thank you very much. It was usually me tossing and turning due to insomnia or one of my two cats darting around.
The last apartment we lived in was on the first floor because it was easier to walk the dogs. Our upstairs neighbor would play the recorder (yes, I’m talking about the plastic instrument) at random intervals at night, play bad pop/techno (anyone remember Aqua?), or have karaoke parties in his room at 2 am on a Wednesday. I complained to the management a few times and found out I wasn’t the only one annoyed. They got a warning and then the fines started. I guess having to pay to be loud got him to change his mind.
For a moment I read it that you used to have an upstairs neighbour who used to play Aqua on the recorder which–while annoying–would have been almost too fantastically weird to complain about.
A couple years ago I had neighbors who were loud enough with their love-making that it would wake me up. Such an unpleasant awakening! I finally started pounding on the wall when it would happen so that they would realize how disruptive and public they were being.
When I was in Catholic High School, we had a priest who taught there, who wore combat boots and rode a Harley to school.
The first thing anyone looked at when their schedules was to see if they got “Father J.”.
He taught on the second floor, and right below his classroom, was the meanest nun in school.
Incidentally, that was the SECOND thing we all looked at our schedules for, as in “Oh no! Not HER!”
She was Sister Maria Theresa, whom we all called “Mary Terry the Culture Vulture”.
Anyway, Father J used lots of fun techniques in his teaching, which a lot of the time was high spirited fun and laughter.
If his class was being particularly noisy, Mary Terry would huff and puff up the stairs to scream at him, “I’m TRYING to teach down there!!!!”
He would set his watch to see how long it was before she came upstairs to yell.
One day, he instructed his class to all stand up, and lift our desks as high as we possibly could, and on his count of three….drop them.
Of course, she came up the screaming, only to find all of us sitting quietly with our hands folded on top of our theology books.
“Well….as you can plainly see, Sister, we are studying quietly….I don’t know what loud noise you speak of! Good day to you, Sister!” 🙂
Our neighbour decided to sand the radiators in his house, with a sander, at 1 AM on a school night.
In other houses I’ve lived in, you could have committed murders without your neighbours hearing a whisper.
Just had serious flashbacks to college dorm life…
The people who live in the rent house across the street from me must have a band because they play music every night from 6 p.m. to about 10 p.m. If they were any good, it wouldn’t be so bad, but they seem to depend on a heavy bass line and percussion. Sound carries very well in my neighborhood, so it sounds like they’re on my front lawn when they play. I don’t know how the folks on either side of them stand it. No one ever stays in that house long, so I’m hoping to just ride it out.
A hilarious video!!!!
We live in a house in the country, so it’s quiet, right? Wrong. We have one close neighbor who is the rudest ever about noise — they lived about 500 yards behind us in a small house on a tiny dot of land surrounded by woods in every direction but ours, although we’ve let volunteer trees in our fence line grow up in the last few years because of them. Therefore, no one else living in this area had the noise we had coming at us. The boys would park their muffler-less trucks in their yard, crank up the boom-da-boom rap, and let it rip, until their mom got home anyway. She made them shut it off. My husband owned a Harley, and he took to parking it by the fence separating our properties for the times mom and dad were at work. When the bass and the foul words got to us and our windows were literally vibrating, he’d go start up his bike and let IT rip for a while. The radios would get cut off, but the next day, they’d do it again, as if they didn’t know they were bothering us. In fact, one of the boys told my husband he didn’t know the music and loud trucks mudbogging in their yard bothered us. My husband corrected his mistaken impressions, but still, this went on for years. They finally grew up and moved out, mom left dad (his increasing drug use ran her off), and now — unemployed druggie dad plays loud music at all hours of the night, like at 10 p.m., 2 a.m. and again at 4 a.m., and we don’t have the Harley anymore….. sigh. There is no noise ordinance in our county, so it does no good to call police. His power was cut off for a few months, so we had peace, but someone turned it back on for him and we’re back to the same.
Oh no! I get so annoyed by rude neighbours that I’ve often thought a house out in the country would be my best option. Apparently not!
Our former next door neighbors were truck farmers; they didn’t have to get up in the morning to milk the cows, and apparently thought they were the only people in the county. Karaoke parties until 2 AM (there *IS* a noise ordnance in our county) and after a few too many beers, gun fire in the dark. Live fire works (illegal) and all the other joys of overgrown “good ol’ boys”. Fortunately, the house across the street was purchased by a police officer from the neighboring county, and seeing that car parked in the driveway certainly calmed things down around here.
I think having terrible upstairs neighbours had turned me into a more conscientious one. I have four cats and a large dog, so have to vacuum a lot. My dog likes to exercise by dropping his ball down the stairs and chasing it. My husband is 6’4″ and 280lbs. I play the violin (poorly) and love to sing loud and off-key. I usually come home from work at 1:30am and my kitchen is directly above my downstairs neighbours bedroom. There is a lot of bad-neighbour potential in my house.
So every time a new neighbour moves in, we go downstairs, introduce ourselves, and ask for some kind of schedule for when they need quiet hours. I will make sure not to vacuum during quiet hours, take my dogs toys away, I make sure my meals are pre-cooked so I’m not banging around in the kitchen when they are asleep. In exchange they walk downstairs and away from the building to smoke; we are non-smokers and I can’t stand when the smell drifts into our apartment.
Everyone would be a little happier if they took the opportunity to talk to their neighbours and try to style their lives around everyone’s needs (to a reasonable extent). Other people are just bitter and hate everything, but there is no pleasing them anyways.
I still remember the man who lived above me who like to start every day off by growling to make his baby laugh. Seriously, for a solid hour every morning starting at 6am it was “Growl”, “hee hee”, Growl”, “hee hee”. It’s very important to keep babies on the same schedule, even on the weekends. So, I also got to listen to this serenade on days when most people like to sleep in a little. I do not miss apartment living.
I was an upstairs neighbor. I had hardwood floors and it would never have occurred to me to do that. Even if I totally hated the downstairs neighbor! Which I didn’t by the way. He was a hoarder back in the days before that A & E show, but I think he just had a lot of stuff. There were no rats or a smell or anything. He was a nice guy. Just because you are the upstairs neighbor doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk though.
I once had upstairs neighbors who drove me crazy for about a year; it was just an older man and who I assume was his teenaged son. The son would frequently get in arguments with his girlfriend in the wee hours. He would hang out his bedroom window, which was directly above MY bedroom window, and his girlfriend would stand outside my bedroom and they would shout at each other. The girlfriend was always very sweet and went away when I opened the window and told her that it was 3 AM and I was sleeping, but that didn’t stop her from coming back a week later.
Then there was the day that I came home and my front step was covered in hair. Curls and curls of hair. ALL OVER. The teenager was hanging out on the balcony, which was just above my front step, at the time, so I asked him if he knew where the hair had come from (I thought it was pretty obvious, especially considering he had much shorter hair than the last time I’d seen him). He looked confused and said that he had no idea, but when I told him I couldn’t see any way it would have gotten on my front step unless someone had brought a bag of hair clippings and deposited it there, he suddenly remembered that he had gotten a haircut on his balcony earlier that day and “cleaned up” by sweeping the clippings off.
It could be worse – my mom lived at an apartment complex where some upstairs neighbors who were also dog owners used to use their balcony patio as their dog’s bathroom because they were too lazy to walk the several flights downstairs to let their dog out. Some of the neighbors simply left all the dog poop to pile up on the patio, but at least one of the neighbor got rid of it by simply pushing the dog poop right off of the patio onto whatever happened to be below! I think one neighbors car got nailed by a big poop pile one time. But better the car than him!
I’ve been a downstairs neighbor for quit some time now and occasionally my patio gets water drippings when the upstairs neighbor waters their plants. It’s nothing bad, and thankfully my patio isn’t the kind of place where you’d want to hang out, so I don’t get hit by water.
I was the upstairs neighbor for a while, but we made an effort to be quiet. Kept our TV at a reasonable volume, tried to walk quietly, set things down gently rather than with a thud, etc.
Our downstairs neighbors though thought it was acceptable to play music so loudly it shook things off our shelves. I swear they had a speaker on a high dresser that was directly under my pillow, and they would start the music up at 7 am on a Saturday. I hated it. So. Freaking. Much. We went down there to ask them to turn it down, and got “yeah yeah yeah” and a door slammed in our face as a response. Ended up having to call the police on them several times because of it.
Now we’re downstairs neighbors. Most of the time our upstairs neighbors are quiet, but when they are loud, they are SUPER loud, like they have forgotten that yes, other people live in the building. Weird noises clattering around in the kitchen. Loud terrible music that scares our cats. Playing fetch with their dog in the house. Plus, have you ever heard those stories where someone calls the police on their neighbors because it sounds like someone is being murdered, but then it turns out the neighbors were just having really loud weird sex? Yeah I never believed those stories could be true til we moved in where we live now. Quite recently I was trying to sleep in on my one day off each week (especially since I had gone to bed feeling gross) and they started at it, and I hate to admit it but I lost it. I have a bullhorn as a prop for a costume, and I grabbed it and shouted “SOME OF US ARE TRYING TO SLEEP” through it at the ceiling, but they were so loud I don’t think they heard me. If it happens again, I’m calling the landlord.
I have a few tales of loud upstairs neighbors. Two in particular:
Neighbor 1: A family living above me in an apartment complex while I was in graduate school. I worked full time and went to school at night. As a result my Saturdays/Sundays were spent doing homework and catching up on household chores. I don’t mind noise but every Saturday, the music from their apartment was so loud, you could not even hear your own music. And they were constantly screaming at their kids (who were rude/bratty). After a several times of my neighbors and myself telling them to turn it down to a reasonable level, I gave up and often headed to the library or coffee shop or even just a park. Many complained, not only about the noise, but about their conduct. The landlord did not renew their lease.
Neighbor 2: Different apartment-my neighbor was a heavy walker. I could live with that but sometimes he would play his music so loud that you could hear nothing else in my place and the neighbor underneath me came up to ask me to turn it down before discovering it wasn’t me. When I went to his place to ask him to turn it down, he could not even hear me banging on the door. Was so happy to move.
I will never understand how people can be so oblivious to common courtesy when it comes to their neighbors. There seems to be a great deal of entitlement. I’m not talking about normal living sounds; I can accept that. I’m talking about overly loud television/stereo not only during quiet hours but during normal hours.
I have to share my one and only pleasant upstairs neighbour story because they are so rare.
I live in an apartment complex with four downstairs apartments and four upstairs. The people upstairs and two apartments across from me like to open all of their windows to let food smells out, which is a fair idea. The only issue was that they all like to talk extremely loudly, so their TV needs to be increased to even louder volumes to compete with them all. I could sit in my living room, with my own TV on, and recite their conversations word for word.
After a week I finally went over there and asked if they could please consider closing a window once it got past, say, 10pm. I was expecting to receive a very rude response but to my great surprise, they apologised profusely, closed the windows and I haven’t heard a peep since.
Oh, my… this made me laugh out loud. It reminded me of the apartment that DH and I rented when we first married, especially the “bowling balls” comment. Every night, at about nine o’clock, we would hear the same sound… “Thump! Thump! Thump!” “Thump! Thump! Thump!” Repeated ad nauseum for about half an hour. It didn’t disturb what we were doing, but my DH’s comment was always, “Are they washing their bowling balls in the tub or something? What on earth can they be up to??” It never failed to make me shriek with laughter. We’re coming up on twenty years married at the end of May, and I shared this post to his FB wall. He loved it!
It was probably someone doing at home calisthenics. My TV provider advertises and add on service that gives you daily work out via the ‘OnDemand’ function. “Its so great you can do it at home in front of the TV” The workouts they show in the commercial are jumping jacks and other activities that would sound like an animal stampede if you preformed them in an apartment. Here’s to hoping I never get an upstairs neighbor that subscribes to that service!!
Very funny. It reminds me of a poem by the great Ogden Nash:
The People Upstairs
The people upstairs all practice ballet.
Their living room is a bowling alley.
Their bedroom is full of conducted tours.
Their radio is louder than yours.
They celebrate week ends all the week.
When they take a shower, your ceilings leak.
They try to get their parties to mix
By supplying their guests with pogo sticks.
And when their orgy at last abates,
They go to the bathroom on roller skates.
I might love the people upstairs wondrous
If instead of above us, they just lived under us.
Ogden Nash
Oh my – I’m SURE that was the inspiration!
“The uploaded has not made this video available in your country”.
The problems with living in Australia…
Oh this is so funny. we’ve gotten used to hearing a lot of neighborly noises (we live in a building that’s about 7 four story units side by side – we hear toilet/bath/hallway noise all the time) but our former upstairs neighbors were just like these people in the video – along with the bowling ball comment. They had a kid, then another, and a dog. the older of the children would [do something very noisy like ride a tricycle or something] and the dog would chase him and then BAM right into the wall. over and over. we did complain, it was quiet for a bit and then would start again. they moved. the current upstairs people are quieter but for some reason make a lot of banging noises very late at night. banging as in using a hammer…
Back when I lived in an apartment (it was a house broken up into three units, with the landlord on the first floor), I was pretty lucky where upstairs neighbors were concerned. I’m an antiques dealer, and many’s the time I’m up at three a.m. to get to where I’m selling by 5:00 a.m. One morning I’m up around three, and I hear some loud-ish rhythmic machine noise – not loud enough to wake me, but once awake a noise you can’t miss hearing. I can’t figure out where it’s coming from. I check every appliance and electrical thing I have – none of them are making any noise. I go outside. No noise out there either. So it must be coming from the apartment above me. I later found that the noise was my neighbor snoring.
These stories, and past experiences, make me so happy I no longer live in an apartment building.
My DH and I went through quite a few years living in different buildings. The worst was the three story walk up we lived in, which was mostly full of students. We were on the top floor on a corner, and could hear the constant comings and goings of people tromping on the stairwell, at all hours. We also had a downstairs neighbor who would play music obscenely loud. I got used to sleeping with ear plugs and dealing with the constant vibrations (unfortunately the super didn’t live on site and our only recourse was to call the police). Eventually that guy moved away and was replaced by much quieter tenants. Luckily our second apartment was one where each unit is segregated by thick concrete walls. We hardly ever heard anything, except the odd bowling ball noise 🙂