No, but I've heard about it in movies.

I’m back here not because I have fun winter activities to tell you about (winter cottage, snowy delights, neighbourhood walks, blah blah blah), but because I am so, so, so angry, and I have nowhere else to put it. I am so angry that when I try to tell people about it, I start to cry a little bit (a standard reaction for me when I have A LOT OF FEELINGS).

Preparing to type this out makes me feel like an over-reacting crazy lady, but keep in mind that using sleep-deprivation as a TORTURE technique has a long history. Our downstairs neighbours are eccentric but delightful ladies. Our upstairs neighbours? Well I have been defending them to Shaun for months “Oh, they’re not bad people, honey, they’re just a little selfish.”

“They just don’t realise that we have a different lifestyle to them.”

“Perhaps they don’t know that our bedroom is off the main hallway.”

Well not any more, ladies, you are awful people. For pretty much the entire time we’ve lived in our apartment we’ve had noise issues with upstairs. One of the girls is a bar tender and regularly gets home after 3am, regularly waking us up. That would be one thing, I mean if that’s when she gets home then what can she do about it? But she often gets home drunk, loud, clumsy, and full of song. She drops heavy items on the floor that forms our bedroom ceiling, she sings all of ‘A Whole New World’ from Disney’s Aladdin, at full volume, she trips over things in the hallway, she slams doors, she has raucous parties, she tiptoes in with friends, only to go out the front to smoke, laugh, and yell.

We are not naturally confrontational people but bit by bit we have ramped up our response to this problem. We banged on the wall, we spoke to them politely the next day, we sent peace offerings of home-brewed beer and received apologetic cards in return, we sent polite text messages the next day, we sent less polite text messages in the moment. Shaun has gone out in his boxers to politely request they keep it down at 4am on a Wednesday. What more can we do? Every time we say something we get apologies and promises to be better in future.

This morning, at 4:30am, it sounded like they were carrying furniture or (I like to imagine) dead bodies down their stairs and through the hallway, dropping whatever or whoever it was regularly and loudly. Bang, crash, thud, shuffle, whisper, laugh, shuffle, thud. Right outside, and I mean right outside, our bedroom door. When whatever bizarro activities they were undertaking resulted in a HUGE crash (it turns out they had knocked over their bikes, which by the way take up over half the shared hallway while our bikes languish outside). I leaped out of bed, tugged my pajama tank top down to cover up the men’s underwear that I sleep in, stormed into the hall and yelled “Are you fucking kidding me? Is this really the best time to do whatever the hell you’re doing? Do you KNOW what time it is?” It was pretty dark so I still have no idea what they were doing. There was a strange, and stinking like the floor of a pub, man standing next to our doorway, who made no reaction to me at all. From what I could tell when our neighbour dragged him out the front door, he was too drunk to walk on his own. She apologised and said they were done (done with what?) and then proceeded to make noise for another hour and a half.

I was kept up for another 30 minutes on top of that because I was so mad. First world problems, I know. But lack of sleep makes me feel awful, so sick. It also makes me late for work and makes it hard to concentrate. For example, after I eventually got up this morning, 40 minutes after my alarm, I accidentally dropped the pill I was trying to take down the plughole in the bathroom sink, and tipped a stack of glasses onto the floor where they smashed to smithereens around my bare feet. Cleaning it up took another 15 minutes out of my already delayed morning. I was so upset that in order to feel better I had to listen to Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus on the way to work. Rarely do I have to bust out the lady angst trifecta. And now I’m eating Timbits. Which are terrible for you. Just terrible. 

This is maybe the 15th time this has happened (the noise, not the timbits - I don’t keep track of those). What can I do? Should we just move out? Will complaining to the landlord do anything or will these girls never change? Am I being unfair expecting everyone to operate to a midnight-6am sleep schedule? Should I take revenge? Why are they doing this to me? In super mature behaviour I have tried to retaliate by running the hairdryer and blender early in the morning but to no avail. I’m probably just bothering our nice neighbours.

Phew, that felt good to get off my chest. Tell me what I should do.