Kate Hackett
Reddit user u/Robwaudby went to the AskReddit community for the answer to a simple question:
“What’s the worst thing you have ever done to an annoying neighbor?”
And guys, I howled. Enjoy some of the best!
1. Electrical Revenge
I had a noisy neighbour in the apartment above me. When I went upstairs to address it, the music was SO loud in the hallway that I couldn’t tell which unit it was coming from. I finally did, knocked on his door and politely asked him to turn it down. He refused. I told him that I have a right to live in my space without hearing his noise. He informed me that he paid the same rent as me and had a right to play music. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere with him.
After a few more days of this, I decided to take action. Each floor had a laundry room. The one on my floor had all of the electrical panels for individual units clearly labelled. Every time he blasted his music, I would go to the laundry room and turn his power off. I started off with a few seconds (to give the illusion that he blew something) but when he STILL wouldn’t put his music lower, I would just shut his power off for hours. I could hear him swearing but I didn’t care. My lease was almost up and as soon as it was, I was out of there.
Even complaining to property management does nothing. They just want the income and could care less about terrible occupants.
2. Feedback
I had a terrible work schedule and had to wake up at 2:30am to be at work by 4am. My downstairs neighbors would blare loud music at all hours of the night, and I could feel the bass through my mattress. I went downstairs and politely asked them to turn down the music, and they seemed to kindly agree. As soon as I got back in bed, they turned it up even louder and kept it going until about 1:30am. Before I left for work at 3:30, I turned over my amplifier so that the speaker was facing the floor, turned the volume up, and set my guitar on top of it. I left for my 12 hour shift, and the feedback was still screaming when I came home. Neighbors never blared their music again.
3. Dogeridoo!
I had neighbors in college who seemed to plan their sexcapades whenever I was studying. I borrowed my wife’s didgeridoo techno cd and faced all my speakers to the wall we shared. Didgeridoo doesn’t have a beat like most Western music, it’s more of a pulse. Really hard to keep a rhythm to, especially if you’re trying to do something at a steady beat, like pounding your girlfriend. They stopped f-cking all hours of the day, and I passed all my classes!
4. Locked!
I put a spigot lock on our hose because she kept using my hose and flooding my flower bed in the process. The lady was pissed.
5. Yuck
We lived in a neighborhood of townhouses. One neighbor let their dogs shit all over everyone’s lawn and never picked it up. We tried asking them, we tried picking it up and putting it on their doorstep, they refused to do it. My one neighbor decided to get a piece of it and smear it all over the front of the house. After that, they started picking it up.
6. Oh no you didn’t.
Did you know you can sign up for the Jehovah’s Witnesses to come to ANY address to teach you about their religion?
YOU’RE WELCOME.
7. Ugh.
They assaulted my dad because he told them to stop yelling at a woman parked in the road, so I bided my time for a few weeks then filled all the locks on their work van with superglue.
8. That kid’s a serial killer
I’m pretty sure I punched a neighbor kid when I was about 10 because he shot our Corgi Husky mix in the back left leg with his BB gun and then shoved her into a hole in the brick foundation of our house. She survived, but she had a limp for the rest of her life.
9. Fix the fence
My grandmother had a neighbor over her back fence who refused to help her repair the fence between their properties. It was still functional as a boundary line, but it was falling apart. Any conversation about fixing the fence ended with him saying that it was on her property so it was her fence and therefore she was fully responsible, which was fair. She took a fall and was hospitalized for a few weeks. Upon her return, she found a new fence built an extra 5 feet into her property and a bill in the mail from the neighbor. He argued with her for months that she owed him, that the original fence was on his property and that where it was now was the boundary line. My grandmother got a surveyor and surprise! The original fence was correct and the neighbor had taken 5 ft of her yard.
At this point she was very old, frail, and tired of fighting her asshole neighbor. Instead, she let nature take over. She planted blackberries along the back fence and within 2 years it was covered. Every year, she’d walk the fence and throw seeds over because of course, it was still her yard. After 5 years of fighting, the blackberries had reclaimed her property. She’s been gone for a few years now but the blackberries remain, her way of haunting her neighbor. He’s tried ripping up the ones on his side of the fence on numerous occasions, but the plants reseed themselves and grow back every year from her side.
10. Stay outta the outhouse
My great-grandfather was one of the last people in town to get indoor plumbing, and as such, had an outhouse in his back yard. Every year on Halloween, neighborhood kids would come into the yard and knock over the building and expose the cesspit.
He got tired of it. So one year, the night before Halloween, he moved the building forward, then covered the fess with burlap, disguising it in leaves and grass clippings. In the dark, it was almost impossible to tell it was there.
Halloween night, he sat in the outhouse and waited. It wasn’t long after sundown when he heard the wet splat outside as a couple of kids fell into the muck.
He lowered a ladder into the cesspit for them to leave after making them promise to never mess with his outhouse again. The kids honored their promise and even spread the word around the neighborhood not to mess with that outhouse any more.
11. Throwing — you guessed it — poo
I was visiting my aunt a couple years ago in Arizona, she lives outside of Phoenix. Their next door neighbors had three or four kids who were super annoying. There was a brick wall dividing their backyards as is common for the area. Upon my arrival I find out that the kids next door throw things over the wall for fun. Not just like harmless twigs and pebbles but like rocks and toys and garbage and even knives. My aunt’s family had to keep their trampoline on the other side of the yard so it wouldn’t get crap thrown into it.
I asked my aunt about it and she said she talked to the parents but they kept throwing shit. So that night I go online and file a police report with their address. Couple days later the neighbors left a note at the front door with this long apology “it won’t happen again” blah blah blah. It pretty much stopped after that.
12. Deal with it
Upstairs neighbour was noisy late at night, like 2am, music, loud footsteps. We had repeated conversations about it but he blew us off, bought us earplugs and told us to ‘deal with it’. Unfortunately for him the breaker box for the building was in our unit. A few tests later with his friendly roommates who hated him just as much, we zeroed in on the breaker to his room and an unoccupied area. Guess who had strange power issues at night when being disruptive . They would miraculously resolve at 7am. He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box and never did suspect us. The landlord was aware of his disruptiveness and he was already on thin ice, we let him know not to call the power cie regarding his issues and he was on board. After assaulting one of his roommates over an unrelated incident, his ass was kicked to the street at the end of the lease.
13. Estate sale
When I was 10 or so an old lady yelled at my brother and I for sitting on “her” curb, and not just yelled she really bitched us out. So we got the bright idea to have an estate sale for her. We got up at like 4am on Saturday morning and put up homemade cardboard garage sale signs we made with her address on them and “early birds welcome” in bold letters. We then sat on the curb a little down the street across from her house and watched people bang on the door for an hour or so. The best part is we didn’t put a date on the signs so if she didn’t find all the signs presumably people would keep showing up every Saturday.
Estate/garage saleing here is an aggressive sport.
14. Build it yourself
My mom’s neighbor called the city to demand they make my mom repair her fence that divided their yards. This lady has always been a crabapple for ten plus years, but this move pissed my mom off. The fence did need a few mild repairs, which my mom would have done if the neighbor had just come talk to her (she was already in the process of getting quotes).
The city contacts my mom and says you have to maintain your fence. My mom asks if she legally has to have a fence and the person she talked to could sense where this was going. Turns out there are rules about maintaining a fence, but not requiring you have one, so my mom pays a contractor to tear it down entirely.
The neighbor does come to talk to my mom and asks when the new fence will be built. My mom says “you want a fence, build it yourself!” Couple weeks later my mom has a nice new fence, courtesy of one annoying neighbor. A little petty, perhaps, but hilarious nonetheless.
15. That’s a rock, sir
My house is right on the corner of an area where the road turns into a T, I had issues with people cutting the corner and driving through my yard( one day someone damn near hit my dog) I went and bought a Boulder probably 300 or 400 pounds and put right on the corner. Come winter and we had a bad snowstorm. Someone was coming through in a lifted dodge and hit the Boulder going about 20 and totaled the truck. Since then though I’ve had 0 issues with people.
16. For Sale
Years ago when you could advertise house sales in the paper without too many pictures, my brother put in an ad for his obnoxious neighbour’s house with an exterior picture and priced it about 75K under market as a private sale with the neighbours phone number. He found out the guy was inundated with calls for weeks but never found out who had listed it.
17. Told the wife
The neighbors (semi detached house) were constantly fighting and they would get drunk every Friday and Saturday (and most Sundays) and blast loud music til 4AM. Well the girlfriend goes out of town for a week for a work training thing and while she’s gone we see another girl park outside the house and we also hear the BF and the new girl going at it very loudly.
So at the next party when they are being super loud at 2AM we both go over to ask them to turn down the music, the boyfriend opens the door and starts shouting that we should mind our own business, the girlfriend appears behind him and says the same. My wife just casually asks ‘Oh did you get back together? What about that nice blonde girl who was over all last week? is this a throuple situation now?’ Then we just went home and enjoyed listening to them throwing everyone out and having their last fight.
18. It’s our house
3rd group of tenants stopped paying rent after 3 months. Since it was winter we couldn’t evict them and my parents had to suffer through their parties and cigarette smell while not receiving rent that was used to pay 70% of the mortgage… My parents being retired they needed the rent money. Almost lost their house because of these assholes.
Well, my brothers and I were home for Christmas that year and after hearing about the issues we decided to take care of it.
Since it’s my parents house and the people stopped paying rent we decided to “move in” with them.
We had the keys and would come in and out of the apartment as we wanted. A friend needs a place to sleep? No worries we have a unit downstairs with 2 beds and 2 couches. Feel free to stay as long as you want.
Bars are closing and we want to keep partying? No problem, we have a furnished apartment and we won’t be bothering my parents.
I would go there to shower at 2 or 3 in the morning so I don’t wake my parents up My brother slept in one of the beds for 5 days. I invited 20 people once and we were all drinking until 5am when on of the guys had to work in the morning.
They did complain about privacy. We told them that according to the law we were not allowed to throw them out at the moment, but since they stopped paying rent they lost all privilege over the house.
They called the cops the first night they found my brother sleeping there. We explained the situation to the police and said that they’d have to take us to court if they wanted us to stop using our apartment.
19. Taters
Poured a bunch of boxes instant mashed potato powder on their lawn so later when it rained they had a lawn full of mashed potato.
