His Old Dogs May Not Learn Any New Tricks, But He Has A Few Up His Sleeve When It Comes To Getting Revenge On A Canine-Unfriendly Neighbor

Chelsea Mize

6 months ago

Reddit/Unsplash

Neighbors can be the best thing ever or the bane of your existence… and it doesn’t necessarily even depend on your own behavior.

Like in this story, when a neighbor hates every sound his upstairs counterpart makes.

If you were in this situation, would you try to reason with the neighbor, or would you get more creative in your approach?

Let’s read how this guy handled it.

Aggressive neighbor lied about my dogs, so I shoved lint into his doorlock

Years ago at this point, but is a favorite petty revenge story amongst friends.

Had a neighbor downstairs, we’ll call him Steve. When Steve moved in he was constantly, I mean CONSTANTLY banging, for weeks.

I thought he was hanging stuff or something.

Then, he noticed a pattern.

I didn’t care a whole lot until about week 4 when I got up from my computer desk and walked across the apartment to use the bathroom and he banged aggressively against the ceiling that I realized he was banging whenever I walked around.

(I usually had a headset for work or was on computer with friends frequently so was easy to not always catch the banging.)

How’s OP gonna react to that?

Now, I’m not a small guy, by any means but I genuinely tried to walk as softly/quietly as possible to be a considerate neighbor.

A couple lived down there previously and moved out 6 months after I moved in but were always friendly, but never hinted that I was loud or I would have happily tried to work something out.

Now that I knew Steve was banging whenever I walked (I spent a week confirming my theory; he banged every time I walked across the apartment)

I tried to address it outside.

Will Steve respond kindly?

At the time I had 2 dogs, my younger boy was 5 and my older boy was 18.

He had arthritis and cataracts but was happy otherwise, and I happily carried him up and down the stairs.

While I was walking the old man I saw Steve come out, and I politely asked if he could stop banging, to which he curtly replied, “I have to listen to you stomp around day and night,” which caught me off guard.

Yeah, Steve, where’d that come from?

I asked, “You mean walking across my apartment?” And he said nothing and just kept walking, but held the door open for me when I carried my dog in.

I thought we were square somehow but the banging continued.

After about 4-5 weeks, I tried addressing the situation a few times, got aggressive responses.

Steve seems like he would have a problem with anybody. How’s this gonna resolve?

I eventually raised my voice a few times as well, but hated it was coming to that so I reached out to the property manager asking what could be done about the situation because I didn’t know what else to do.

She took my email as a noise complaint against Steve, who turned around and said both of my dogs bark constantly day and night and pee up and down the stairs.

Mind you, I carried the old guy so he’d pee on me if anything, and hadn’t barked in about 4 years.

Aw, poor old man. Why would Steve take this out on him?

But I was furious that he would involve my dogs in this.

So one day I came home on my lunch break, knowing very well Steve was never home during the day and didn’t come home.

I scraped a bit of lint from the inside of one of my hoodies and went down to his door and used my key to shove JUST enough lint into his lock that when you put the key in it was millimeters from going in all the way, but it wouldn’t budge.

Subtle but devastating.

I came back to the maintenance guy going in the through the kitchen window who said the guy blew up on him and the property manager before leaving and how much neither of them liked Steve.

The banging stopped for quite a while after that.

Wow, OP really put Steve on lockdown.

Let’s see what the comments on Reddit are woofing about on this one.

One person has a more advanced version of this revenge.