A bloke in Melbourne, Australia who loves beer, dudes, metal music and falling over. RAD!

What to do about annoying neighours when soundproofing isn’t an option? I’ve lived near a lot of explosively noisy neighbours, so here’s some short-term and long-term solutions that worked for me. You won’t even need to get out the knuckledusters!

Step 1: Create a diary of woe

I cannot emphasise how important this step is! If you’ve just moved in, or you have new neighbours, then write down the time the noise started and stopped. It also helps to note what you did about the noise. Don’t stop keeping these notes! It will take you 30 seconds whenever the noise occurs – just create a simple text file on your computer. If you’re wondering how to stop your neighbours from continuing their behaviour, this is the golden ticket in the long run.

It’ll probably help if you add some swear words describing your feelings along each entry. It’s not really necessary, but it’ll make you feel a hell of a lot better!

Anyway, this stuff is so important just in case things get serious. You don’t want to be eventually stuck at a tribunal trying to remember the series of events, when you can instead whack down a pile of paper documenting everything and scream “SEE?!”

Step 2: Impersonate the world’s most inoffensive person

Okay, now pretend you’re someone like Chris Martin from Coldplay, a pottery salesperson or David Stratton. Basically, embrace your inner beige as much as you can, and begin roleplaying the most inoffensive person you know. This will put you in perfect preparation for the personality you need to present to your noisy neighbour.

Pay them a visit, shake their hand, introduce yourself as their neighbour. Don’t even mention the noise for the first couple of minutes of conversation. See if you can spot anything inside their place that you can create friendly conversation from. This includes things like a bike in the hallway, or listening for the music they’ve been playing too loudly – perhaps you have similar taste in music. Basically, look for anything to create some sort of rapport.

Ask them questions they’re probably going to reply “yes” to. Think of things ahead of time like “have you lived here for a while?” Getting people to repeatedly answer “yes” when you first meet them is a proven method of manipulating people into liking you. Sneaky, but it works!

Once you’ve got them on side, gently bring up the issue of the noise. Don’t get into emotions by describing how upset it made you – this will undo all the work you’ve just done in getting them to like you! Just state the facts and politely ask if they can change their behaviour.

If the noise continues after you’ve tried this, you crack your knuckles and get serious. This is where montages start in movies. [click to continue…]

{ 3 comments }

My new apartment block seemed amazing based on first impressions. We’d barely moved in and our friendly neighbours were racing each other to introduce themselves.

It’s a pretty amazing situation: the entire apartment block frequently hangs out as a group socially. Everyone knows each other, and it sure doesn’t seem like there’s any secrets. Driveway cricket, keg parties, lots of laughs… it seemed like such an ideal social environment.

Unfortunately, over time, my housemate Matt and I came to realise a few home truths.

We are smarter, smell better and are more awesome than everyone else in the building. That’s not being up ourselves, it’s simply the wretched facts. Indulge me as I explain…

We are smarter

At first, we figured everyone just really liked talking about beer, football and hair extensions. Then we came to realise these are the goalposts which govern these peoples’ lives. It’s extremely rare we hear any conversation veer away from these reliable topics (which are usually bellowed from various balconies at 3am in the morning). If someone dared mention someone like Ron Mueck instead of Gary Abblett Jnr, you’d see a few heads splatteringly explode in bafflement.

We smell better

The apartment downstairs has a periodic cooking festival, where they seem to cook a freaking fortnight’s worth of food over the course of 24 hours. By food, I refer exclusively to aromatic curry. At first, that can be quite pleasant; but by the twelfth hour you’re really beginning to understand how the stench of korma paste can infiltrate your clothing.

Matt’s deduced that due to poor building design, the downstairs oven ventilation is generally flowing right into our kitchen cupboards, which recently lead to us sealing up selected doors with masking tape. Although we don’t have easy access to our saucepans anymore, we’d rather get take-out than get smoked out with vindaloo.

We’re more awesome

How do we spend our days? Spontaneously dancing to Andrew W.K. and causing ourselves great injury (I recently gashed open my leg attempting to use a bicycle pump as a baton). Creating ridiculous alternate personas and talking in the most ridiculous voices. Having fun!

How do the neighbours spend their days? Loudly blaring out Shannon Noll and Kings of Leon while they shriekingly dissect how drunk they all were the previous evening (while getting back on the turps all over again). That’s fun now and then, but when it’s exclusively how you spend your days… BORING.

Oh, there’s also the small matter of..

We’re not massive whores

Well, we’re both red-blooded single men, so we’re a tiny bit whore-ish; but that’s nothing compared to the three lasses who live downstairs. Although we’ve definitely confirmed from the other neighbours they’re all exotic dancers, some interesting evidence is coming to light.

Matt recently took a weekday off work, and noticed the consistent flow of hourly visitors to the dancers’ apartment. Hourly, as in, on the hour – every hour. Methinks there’s a little more than mere dancing going on down there…

As excited as we were to move into this building, we’re slowly cottoning on that we’re cut from a different cloth from everyone else who lives here. Unless we lose a few brain cells, begin cooking rancid goat meat every evening and develop a case of gonorrhea, I think we’ll remain on the outer.

{ 8 comments }