Imagine having an annoying neighbor who thinks that the land you bought actually belongs to him.

He also seems to have too much time on his hands, so he stands on the property line staring in your windows.

Would you accept your fate as being neighbors to the worse neighbor ever, or would you find a way to distract the neighbor and convince him to be nice to you?

In today’s story, one man with an annoying neighbor creates a problem for the neighbor to try to fix.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Created a problem to keep my annoying neighbor occupied and get some peace

In the early 90s, we bought a new house on a lot that was recently severed and sold from the neighbor’s property.

It was a large corner lot, divided into two parcels.

The back parcel was originally intended as a second driveway to connect the side road to the neighbor’s, but was mistakenly sold to us.

Our neighbor, a known grumpy old guy, insisted that this back parcel was his property and was never intended to be sold (he and his lawyer messed up).

This sounds REALLY annoying!

He would often stand there, right in front of our bedroom windows to kinda mark his property!

Trying to have a reasonable conversation with him was impossible.

I repeatedly told him that I had the deed and that the property line wasn’t going to change.

He got revenge via the TV.

His wife was rarely seen as she had limited mobility and spent most of her time watching TV connected to a C-band satellite dish.

At the time, I was working in wireless and had access to test equipment.

To find a way to keep the neighbor occupied and hopefully give us some peace, I decided to generate interference that would jam his satellite signal.

I set it up on a timer so their signal would cut out ten minutes before the hour and come back ten minutes after, meaning they would consistently miss the beginnings and ends of their TV programs.

The revenge worked.

This definitely kept him busy trying to figure out what was wrong.

He even called out technicians, but of course, the issue never occurred when they were there.

I could often hear his frustrated outbursts, and I imagine his wife was adding to the pressure.

After a few weeks of this, I walked over to him while he was fiddling with the dish and casually mentioned that I worked in wireless and had some knowledge of satellite communications and maybe I could have a look.

He was able to fix the problem he created.

He was immediately interested, so I climbed up the ladder, pretended to adjust something, gave him some technical-sounding nonsense about what I had found, and then told him it was fixed.

I then stopped the interference coming from my house.

A few days later, he came over to thank me profusely, saying I had fixed it when no one else could!

From that day forward, he was the friendliest neighbor and never mentioned the contested piece of land again.

That’s funny!

By creating a problem only he knew how to fix, he was able to get the neighbor to be nice to him. Well played!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person isn’t sure how to feel about this story.

Another person likes how the story played out.

This person calls the neighbor petty.

This person has a question.

He’s lucky he didn’t end up in jail.

And they all lived happily ever after!

Probably.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.