it's daily prompt time
#5 - What the fuck are the upstairs neighbors doing
i actually have a pretty funny one for this. it was a whole saga with my final upstairs neighbors at my old apartment - the previous couple of them were totally fine but this family was all sorts of noisy. they had a small, growing spawn up there who was rapidly evolving into toddler territory, bounding around all over the floor in a stampeding sort of sound that you could've fooled me into thinking was an adult willfully stomping their feet.
anyway, that's not actually what this story is about, nor is it about the dad playing call of duty on sub-cranked speakers sitting on the floor. or their weird habit of vacuuming between 11pm and 1am. this is about NURSERY RHYMES. specifically CUTESY DANCE REMIXES OF NURSERY RHYMES.
in an effort to ruin their newborn spawn's hearing, these folks would play these nursery rhyme CDs with dancey, techno kinda beats for their kid, for hours on end, on repeat, at absurdly loud volume. there were at least 3 volumes, and i could clearly recognize most of the songs and hear the vast majority of the lyrics, so loud was this CD player. at any point during the morning, afternoon or evening, this could get fired up for a several-hour rotation, and it was absolutely maddening. it drove me insane, for like, months, and frankly i didn't want to complain again to my landlady (who lived next door and surprisingly could not hear this) because she'd kinda indicated if i had more issues with them then she'd have to maybe take more serious action against them. and i didn't want that for these people. it's their home too, why would i wanna disrupt their life?
what i ended up doing was writing them a note myself, attached to a freshly baked bag of chocolate chip cookies as a peace offering, asking them to please keep the thing turned down because i could clearly hear it all the time, and blessedly they did. it was only occasionally slightly detectable after that, so my sanity was spared. man, they were difficult neighbors in terms of noise though... and somewhere in my giant pile of Voice Memos(tm) on my phone, i have a bunch of recordings of what these songs sounded like coming through the ceiling. what a time that was - it was such a funny saga with my friends at the time.
