Neighbors

I'm trying to write.  You see, I'm 140 pages into a novel I'm writing, and I generally only get good blocks of hours to write it on Mondays and Wednesdays.  Today's a Monday, so it's a writing day.

Unfortunately for me, my neighbors' smoke detector is doing that horrible obnoxious beep every 15 seconds to indicate the battery is low.  Also unfortunately for me, these neighbors have no clue how to turn it off.  Replacing the battery doesn't seem to be an option for them.  I know this from experience.  So I would like to barge into their apartment and channel Phoebe from Friends and do this to it:

We used to have neighbors who were kind of mysterious.  As in the husband seemed to have a wife and a girlfriend who both lived there at alternate times of the day mysterious.  Those neighbors have been replaced by neighbors whom I have to admit I don't much care for as neighbors.  It's a large multi-generational family living in a small apartment, and when one or both of the very tiny children has a temper tantrum, their grandma takes them out of the apartment and into the hallway so they can scream for the whole hallway to hear rather than just for their own family to enjoy.  Several times when this has happened, my fiancé and I have gone out to the hallway and tried (as politely as possible) to tell the grandma that the walls are very thin and that when she does that it's as if they're in our apartment (and to make things worse, the hallway has a couch that sits against the wall to our apartment -- and our own couch is on the other side of that wall.  So when they sit there, we're two feet from a screaming baby).  We quickly discovered that the grandma does not speak English though, so communication is futile.  So now we're resigned to baby temper tantrums and just crank up the TV and remember that we used to live next to train tracks, and at least a baby screaming is better than this:

Not long after they moved in, I panicked when I smelled a sewer smell coming from their apartment.  I was worried no one was home and that their toilet broke and all sorts of nasty stuff was spreading all over the floors and I was breathing in toxic waste.  We mentioned it to the super and he said yeah he knows the smell -- it's their cooking.

So now we're resigned to that.

Then there's the mysterious spraying sound.  Between 4:30 and 7:30 pm I routinely hear what sounds like a large spray hose in their apartment, spraying either a high-powered liquid or gas.  It goes in bursts of up to 30 seconds, off and on for maybe five minutes.  It drives me crazy because I can't imagine what the sound could possibly be.  Do they power-wash their entire apartment with a fire hose?  That seems unlikely.  Do they spray insecticide over their apartment regularly?  Also unlikely.  My fiancé isn't bothered in the least by this, which drives me even more crazy.  Yesterday we were watching a TV show and he was just leaning back against the couch without a care in the world while I was flipping out about what the sound is and how it doesn't bother him that he doesn't know and there are no rational explanations.  WHAT IS THE SOUND???

And then there's the smoke detector.  It first went off a few weeks ago.  Beep...... Beep..... Beep..... Beep.  The smoke detector violently persisted in alerting the residents that it needed a new battery.  I could tell there were people home in the apartment, and I didn't understand how it could not be bothering them.  Beep.... Beep.... Beep.... Beep.   Still, I could hear them shuffling dishes and going about business as usual.  Did they not know what the sound was?  No, impossible.  Everyone knows what that sound is.  And we have a superintendent who is readily available and super friendly and could instantly deal with it.

Hours later, the beeping suddenly stopped.  Then I heard a man curse.  Then I heard a baby scream.  Then I heard the door to their apartment open and the dad of the house stepped out and called our superintendent on his cell phone.  And he explained to the super how he had tried to make the smoke detector stop by cutting a wire, and that had blown a fuse and now the lights were out in the apartment.

...Excuse me, what??  He tried to stop it by cutting a wire?!  WHO DOES THAT????!

Sigh.

It's three weeks later, and I guess they just got the smoke detector hooked up again.

And they still won't just change the stupid battery.

So now this is me: