When you have a neighbor with whom you are constantly fighting, it is good to try to find a way to get on their good side, though.

That was the situation that the wireless technician in this story was in, so he secretly put up a satellite interference signal to block their TV. After a few weeks, he offered to fix the problem.

The neighbor accepted and thought he was a hero for fixing his TV, and he never caused him problems again.

This is one of those funny situations where doing something that is morally wrong ended up producing something that was good. Read through the story for yourself and see what you think.

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.

If it was sold legally, it doesn’t matter if it was a mistake.

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).

He is not giving that property up without a fight.

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

Trying to have a reasonable conversation with him was impossible.

It doesn’t matter that he isn’t happy; he lost that property.

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

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.

I’m not sure this is actually legal.

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 bet this was very frustrating.

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.

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.

Now he wants to swoop in and be the hero.

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 solved the problem, like magic.

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.

Maybe it was an immoral thing to do. But it was effective.

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.

I can’t say that he handled this well, but he did get the issue fixed. And it is pretty funny.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

This commenter thought it was very funny.

Sounds believable to me.

Weird things happen, sometimes.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a barn owner who wants to evict a tenant who promised to build stalls but never did.

The FCC does not like people messing with their signals.

This person had a friend do something similar.

Sometimes doing the wrong thing can get you exactly what you want, but that doesn’t make it right. I think that the neighbor just needed to be shown that this was a good guy.

Right or wrong, this was a really funny way to handle a very difficult situation, though.