Andi, P.I.
I’ve been up to a little detective work this evening…
For several months, one of my neighbors has been playing music quite loud late into the night. Prior to Christmas, it wasn’t too bad as I could only hear it if I went out on the back porch. Shortly after Christmas, it got much worse, louder with more bass. Now I can hear it through the walls in my bedroom at night. Outside it sounds distant as if it’s being played outdoors about a block or so away. And it happens almost every night. I’m pretty tolerant about music and parties on the weekends, but every night?!
Last Wednesday night it was so bad that it kept me up for over an hour after I’d gone to bed. Then it woke me up again at 4am. I had been reluctant to call the police since I couldn’t pinpoint an exact address, but the wake up 2-1/2 hours prior to my alarm clock put me over the edge. I made the call and tried to describe the location I thought it was coming from. I dozed a little but never quite got back to sleep and the bass was still thumping into my room when my alarm finally did go off. I was annoyed and disappointed that the police had apparently done nothing about it. It went on again Thursday night, but since I went out for my birthday I was intoxicated enough to fall asleep that night without too much trouble.
There were a few blissfully silent nights and I thought that some other neighbor must have complained with an exact address. Then it started up again tonight around 7pm. After an hour of it, I decided to take a drive around my neighborhood to see if I could determine the location. It was barely audible on the front side of my house and between the sound of my car and the traffic on the nearest main road, my search didn’t yield any results. It was terribly frustrating, as if there was this magical annoying music that could only be heard in my backyard and my room!!! The cops must have thought I was crazy when I called in the noise complaint. I decided to walk around my neighborhood (alone at night, maybe not the brightest move) and I was able to determine that it was definitely coming from somewhere on the row of backyards behind my house between my street and the street behind us. I still couldn’t get a fix on it without sneaking into neighbor’s backyards, so I headed back to my house.
I decided to give it one more try and went into my backyard. I headed for the corner of our fence intending to stand up on the fence in the hopes that I could determine the house. It turns out that I didn’t have to do that. As I got closer to the fence it became abundantly clear that the noise was coming from the back room of my neighbor’s house, which by the way, is about 3 feet away from my bedroom wall. No wonder I can hear it in my room!
Problem solved, right? Wrong!!! This particular neighbor works nights, so he’s not at home and won’t be home until it’s time for me to get up for class in the morning. I don’t want to call the cops on my next-door neighbor and it wouldn’t do any good anyway, unless they were willing to flip his breaker… I actually considered doing that myself, but it’s raining and I have bad luck with electricity in general. No really, I get shocked all the time. There was the electric flyswatter, a light socket, the liquor cooler, the kegbox, and the neon “Open” sign when I worked at Texas Bar & Grill, and most recently, the treadmill at the gym shocked me no less than three times today! I guess I’ll just have to try to talk to him tomorrow when I get home from class. I hate that kind of confrontation, but I’m sure he’s not doing it to be a nuisance, just to keep his house safe (in theory) while he’s at work.
