These Neighbors Got Their Petty Revenge
Sadly, not everyone is blessed with having good neighbors. Some of us end up living next to our worst nightmares. And guess what? Bad neighbors inspire the worst kind of petty behavior.
1. Comparing Sound
My neighbor would crank his house music up as high as it could go and then leave for the night. It was mildly annoying in certain parts of my home. So, I decided on some petty revenge. I bought some huge speakers of my own and played the same song back. Literally the same song, over and over and over while I went on vacation for four days.
I'm not sure who was the pettier neighbor, but we both stopped doing it after that. Funny thing is, sometime later when he was throwing a party, he asked if he could use my speakers cause of how nice and loud they were.
2. Garbage Fight!
We had some neighbors that used to leave their garbage out in plastic bags the night before garbage day instead of putting it in a bin. Around here, that's just ringing the dinner bell for raccoons and other critters. Sure enough, come morning, there's garbage strewn all over the neighborhood. What the raccoons and skunks didn't spread around, the wind picked up the slack.
Some of the people on the street kindly approached the guy and asked him to put his garbage in a bin—but he gave them all the nastiest response. He told them in no kind words to shut it. Thus began the Garbage Wars. Every morning of garbage day, some people on my street would collect all the half-eaten and rotten trash from their lawns and toss it back into the dude's backyard.
He would collect it, then dump it back on their lawns. Or cram it into their bushes. People started finding half-eaten burritos and candy wrappers in their mailboxes. The street started to look like a slum. People were called. Health inspectors. City by-law enforcement. Each side was calling in whatever authority they could muster to get their enemy.
The dude and his family lasted about eight months, and then moved. Every once in a while, I find a random margarine lid or piece of styrofoam in my hedge, and my mind goes back to those dark days of garbage.
3. Littering Kittens
We rented a house that had another apartment in the basement. The lady who lived below us kept to herself for the most part, so we didn't see her much. Part of our rental was a detached garage and she asked if she could put a small deep freezer in our garage. We were using it for storage, so we were fine with it. After a couple of weeks of having her freezer in there, it somehow got unplugged. Her reaction was deranged.
She came unglued on us and wanted us to pay to replace everything. I understood her frustration, but we hardly ever went into the garage since it was only for storage. In other words, we definitely didn't unplug it and our landlord agreed. But she was SO mad. The lady also had a son in college who came home for the summer. During that summer he found a cat and brought it home.
His mom said no cats inside, so he would feed the kitten outside. She was pretty wild. He left for school again in the fall and we noticed that the cat was getting very thin. We started feeding her outside in her usual spot. Around Christmas, we bought a bag of cat food, and I made a plate of cookies and left them both at our neighbor's front door.
The next day they were both back on our porch. Rude, but whatever. We continued to feed the cat because she obviously wasn't feeding her. A few weeks later the cat came to our door crying. She was trying to come inside. Super weird considering she was pretty wild, and we had never let her inside before. I let the cat in and noticed she was pregnant and about to have kittens.
I made her a little corner and she had babies the next day. We let her stay in the house with us, but we knew we couldn't keep her. I went downstairs to talk to our neighbor. She said that her son's cat was a boy so the cat we had obviously wasn't his. I posted on Facebook to see if anyone was interested in fostering a cat and her kittens because we couldn't keep her.
Her son saw my post on Facebook and got super mad at his mom. Oh, and this is the most infuriating part of all. THAT'S when reported me, said that I took her cat, and lied to me when she confronted me about having the cat in my possession. It was the stupidest, most frustrating thing that had ever happened to me as far as neighbors go.
4. Serves You Right!
Last November, my brother passed unexpectedly. We upheld covid restrictions, and the officers who had helped us told us that on the day of his funeral we could still have up to 10 people in the yard, just not in the house. After the funeral, around six people came by, and we sat around the fire pit talking and crying. No partying, no one in the house. And yet, our neighbor went the extra mile to make our lives even more of a nightmare.
Our neighbor called law enforcement to report that we were breaking restrictions and then she stood in the window waiting for them to arrive. The same officers who were with us before showed up and decided to sit with us in the yard and chat with us, see how everyone was doing. She flew into a rage and came into her backyard yelling at us—but she didn't stop there.
She screamed that she was contacting her lawyer, saying that my brother was a loser, and no one cares he's gone, just really nasty things. Two of the officers went over and tried talking to her to help her calm down. Instead, she threw a Walmart bag full of stuff at one of the officers and tried to spit on them. The highlight of one of the worst days of my life was watching her stuffed into a patrol car and taken away for assaulting an officer. My brother would have loved it.
