Justice shall be served.
Nothing is worse than having to share outdoor space with irritating people. Especially when it’s an outdoor space you’ve worked to make nice and those people are rude, inconsiderate, condescending, creepy, and messy (not that I’m speaking from experience here or anything). But fear not, P-Mag to the rescue with this super-serious* guide to dealing with obnoxious neighbors.
- Highway retaining wall.
- Cover everything on the patio in bubble wrap, then sit there like, what, you’ve never seen patio furniture covered in bubble wrap before?
- Install that laser grid thing from Resident Evil and deploy it whenever you want the place to yourself.
- Two words: foam party
- Every time they try to make conversation, reply by speaking in tongues.
- Fill their side of the porch with playpen balls. If no playpen balls are available, cotton balls will work. Especially if it’s rainy.
- Record a child relentlessly asking “why” and play it on a loop whenever they’re outside.
- Open window weather is, like, a really good time to learn to play the French horn, isn’t it?
- Plant one of those trees that smells like jizz.
- Buy a white noise machine. Buy 100 white noise machines and aim them all at their windows and doors and turn them on at top volume. That’ll learn ’em.
*This is a joke. I am sure you’re smart enough to figure that out, but the last thing we need is a lawsuit on our hands because someone tried to laser slice their next-door neighbors.
9 replies on “Persephone’s Totally Serious Guide to Dealing with Obnoxious Neighbors”
Bahahaha. I loved this.
I would love nothing more than a highway retaining wall between me and my next door neighbor. His house is 3 feet from our property line and I’m tired of looking at it (it hasn’t been kept up). Then there’s the fact that he dumped his old rusty tangled chain link fence in our yard when he FINALLY decided to fix it and only said, “Sorry about the mess,” to my husband. Argh. Fortunately my husband is a bigger person than I am because I would have gone off on his ass. I seriously wanted to chuck it over the fence and into his yard in the middle of the night.
#5: Because I’m relatively fluent in French and this neighborhood (or city) definitely does not have an established French population, I’m considering speaking/yelling in French if I ever get into another argument with my most obnoxious neighbors. Or even yelling at the bratty screaming kids in French. Either they’ll look at me as though I’m crazy and back away slowly, or they’ll understand me and be too scared to not shut their damn mouths “parce que j’ai une arbalète et je sais l’utiliser!”
Ha. The best I could do is yell a little in Spanish, but that’s not that special because in NYC it seems like everyone and their cat knows at least some Spanish.
We had a shared fence with a neighbor who…
1. really liked Kenny G
2. played his music loudly and ceaselessly
3. on her outdoor speakers
4. that were fake coconuts
5. on fake palm trees
6. situated on the fake sandy beach.
There should be a noise violation issued for Kenny G alone.
Play “The Rains of Castamere” at full blast and then take a nice neighborhood stroll, swords in hand.
But it’s been such a long time since we’ve had a law suit!
*also a joke
And that one was just SO MUCH FUN.
#9. VALIDATION!! I thought I was the only one who thought those trees smell like jizz. We have lots of them around here and when they bloom, that smell is everywhere!