Common Courtesy Dreamed 3056 days ago | | 703 words
Today, I awoke to a letter taped to my front door. It was a letter from our apartment building management. It says “Several complaints regarding loud noises coming from your apartment, has been brought to the attention of the management.
It then goes on to quote the noise part of the lease agreement.
I have no problem with any of this. I want to be a good neighbor. I want to live in harmony with those around me.
The problem I do have is this is the first I am aware anyone has had a problem with me.
Not once have I gotten a knock on the door or ring of my doorbell. Not once have I had a neighbor talk to me or complain to my about the noise from my apartment. Not once have I had any indication my volume was an issue to anyone.
In my apartment building, many of the front doors are poorly hung and do not fit snugly into the door jam. I brought this up when we moved in on our initial inspection and have mentioned it time and time again to our management.
Even while watching TV at a reasonable volume, it can be clearly heard in the hallway because the sound travels right through the front door so I have no doubt the movie or video game or TV show can be heard in the hallway outside my door.
However, I don’t think it’s ever been loud enough to annoy someone in a neighboring apartment. If I had known, I would have immediately turned it down.
I look at it this way. If you’re annoyed enough with the problem to complain to the office. But not annoyed enough to walk one door down and ask the offender to rectify it, it can’t be that much of an annoyance.
If it was a movie, it could be loud for one or more hours. If it was a video game, it could be an annoyance for three or four hours. So you’re going to suffer through this excessive noise for this time without taking a single action to quiet it? I don’t get it. I don’t understand that at all. It’s one thing if you had come to me and complained and I didn’t act. Then by all means, complain to the office. However, if you don’t even let me know it’s a problem there’s absolutely nothing I am going to do about it. I can’t! I don’t even know there’s anything to be done.
When did we get to a point where simply talking to our neighbor about a problem is too taxing or difficult? How is calling the office to get a letter typed and sent days? weeks? months? later a solution to the problem?
I just don’t get it. I don’t want to be a bad guy or a bad neighbor. I want to live happily with those around me. However, this just irritates me. Now I have a letter in my file and I still have no idea who or when the complaint was made.
The apartment across the hall from mine is being gutted and remodeled and the workmen there have been very noisy for the past few weeks so I don’t even know if the complaint was about me or just somewhere near me.
I have written an email to the apartment management since when I went down this morning, no one there knew anything about it and the lady I needed to speak to would not be in until well after I went to work and they close before I get home.
I have asked them for a record of the complaints so I can try to figure out what I was doing when the complaints were made and curb that activity. I am also debating writing short, polite notes to the two neighbors directly next to me (though I am nearly certain which one it was) telling them I will be more than happy to lower the volume if it is annoying them in the future. They just have to ask. I will provide my apartment phone number as well.
What would you do in this situation? I’m really annoyed this morning, am I just blowing this out of proportion?
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