Welcome to the neighborhood

We were working on the kitchen when there was a knock on the door. My wife (Mrs Giro) answered and to her delight it was a neighbor, who will forever be referred to as Tweedle Dee (TD) who can only be described as a short gangly woman who looks about 70 years old. Truthfully though she's in her 50's, is a section 8 housing resident living in a unit owned by the Boston Housing Authority who never lets light into her apartment by leaving her blinds closed at all times. It's rather sad to see somebody live like this, but my sympathy flew out the door ages ago.

Keep in mind that I can only hear the conversation, but what was expected to be a welcome to the building visit immediately turned into "I can hear you walking around late at night. Please make it stop." My wife, somewhat shocked yet always the peacemaker, apologize and said we would be more conscious of our walking. Since my wife knows me too well she could hear me moving to the door to provide an alternative message to the neighbor, but she gave me a stiff arm and prevented a much more terse response. Normally I can put up with a lot, but I have zero tolerance for blatant ignorance and flat out selfish behavior. I would understand if after a week or two you wanted to politely tell us that you could hear some noise, but not within three days of moving in. That is unacceptable, but Mrs G tempered my emotions by assuring me that it was probably a one time thing. So what happens next? The following Saturday afternoon I was vacuuming and I get the first of what turned into a thousand ceiling hits to alert us that we were making too much noise. Now if only the story would have ended there, but this led to continued banging and one evening in January TD verbally berated friends of ours who were having a conversation and a cigarette outside of our building and on a city sidewalk. The behavior is over the top and please keep in mind that at this time we had no idea TD was a BHA resident and well outside of the protocol of how a BHA tenant is supposed to handle an issue.

The ceiling hits became so routine that we eventually drowned it out, but nothing irked me more than knowing this was all related to two people moving naturally like human beings were intended. As a result, since we have hardwood floors covering our entire condo we laid down rugs in our high traffic areas; dining room, living room, hallway. I really didn't want to for aesthetic reasons, but Mrs G felt that it was worth spending the money to see if we could get TD to stop. Did that work? Of course not.