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[clean]

Get the landlord's number.  IF you can not sleep, neither should the landlord!!


Look it up in the county's property tax records.

Start looking for anohter place.  It doesnt sound like it is all that wonderful a place in the first place.

[wild_rose]

After reading these stories, I guess I shouldn't complain about my lead-footed upstairs neighbor.

[history_grrrl]

Anyone have any bright ideas on how to get fellow public transit users from blowing out their ears and also blasting away noise from their ipods. I try to ask them to turn it down, but they just look at me funny.

My standard is that if i can hear the music clearly from their ipods thingies in their ears then it was too loud both for me and for their ears.

Some time ago I found myself in an utterly crammed train for about half an hour with a subject who exhibited this phenomenon. Unfortunately, he was a particularly good example, given the fact that it was about double as loud as most of these people put their volume. Thus, not only could I hear the music clearly... I could hear it clearly and it was doubly disturbing for my reading.

I glared at him. Everybody in the wagon glared at him.

He shrugged and didn't do anything about it.

I too find this unbearable, especially when you can't really hear the lyrics but just the WAHWAHWAH of the bass or whatever, blasting away. Glaring doesn't work. You have to ask the person to turn down their music. I do this a lot because I'm usually trying to read while I'm on the bus or whatever, and I've decided I don't care if the offender thinks I'm an ol' fuddy-duddy. I'm always polite, and it usually works. (The exception was this ass of a grad student who was blasting his music in the campus library when I was in grad school. He launched into a tirade.) Another option: ear plugs. But once in a while I feel tempted to start reading aloud and see what happens. I haven't actually don't this yet, because while I'm willing to be perceived as a fuddy-duddy, I'm not excited about being considered crazy.

[barred_owl]

Love the idea of reading aloud as a counter-offensive, history_grrrl!

I was held captive to my niece's iPod selections yesterday on a half-hour drive.  Oh lordy--either I'm getting old, or I just don't get it.  One song she selected was so foul, I about jumped out of the car on the turnpike!  The one right after that sang (sort of) the praises of "Saint Mary Jane" (although, to be fair, I'm from the generation that produced "White Rabbit," so I couldn't be too critical).  What bothered me most was that my niece's children (ages 7 and 3) hear these songs all the time at home...and my niece wonders why her 3-year-old has the budding vocabulary of a sailor.  Oy!

Oh, and don't you just love the folks who cruise around with the bass thumping so loud that their cars visibly rattle?  Glaring at them when they pull up next to you at a stoplight is hard to do, though, because there seems to be a direct relationship between the power of the bass and the presence of dark-tinted windows on such cars.

[dellaroux]

Those cars are known as pimpmobiles in some places...might explain the dark windows, anyway...

I do not suffer noise-polluting fools gladly on public transit (or anywhere else.)

Yesterday the young woman across the aisle, at the far side by the window, was talking so loudly on her cell phone I could have answered her.

So I did, for a couple of exchanges.

She looked up, confused.

I walked over and said, "I CAN HEAR YOU ALL THE WAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CAR!'

She said to her correspondant, "I have to get off now. Someone's complaining that I'm talking too loud."

Sweet silence....I smiled and finished my crossword puzzle in peace.

[testingthewaters]

OP, I feel for you.

We had neighbors who loved their karaoke. A lot. Loudly. Praise be to any and all deities, they moved recently and silence has descended upon the Waters household. This was due in no small part to some of the tactics mentioned above.

Work with the system, full guns blazing, starting with the landlord but moving on quickly to the Powers that Be in your area if the landlord doesn't work with you immediately (ours didn't). These kinds of yahoos (both neighbor and landlord) probably aren't used to dealing with "the system", and you can probably get more paperwork to descend upon them than they imagined possible. It fries their brains. Eventually they figure it's not worth the effort and move, or at least get you out of your lease.

[big_giant_head]

In my experience, attempts to counter their noise with your noise doesn't work, because loud noise just doesn't bother them.

Years ago, when my ex-husband and I lived in military housing in Stuttgart, we had the middle apartment in a 3-story building.  Above us, the neighbors blasted--and I do mean blasted--heavy metal all evening and most of the night.  Across the hall from them, the residents loved Stevie Wonder (and I still can't stand him, thanks to them) and would play the same song over and over and over, from Friday afternoon until early Saturday morning.  They had loud parties EVERY single weekend.  Downstairs, it was bar-rock and country.  That jerk woke us up one Christmas morning at 5 am, yelling along with Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."   

And best of all were the guys who set their lawn chairs across the stairwell steps and camped out all weekend long.  They backed up a van to the porch, opened its back doors, and cranked up Latino music so that it echoed up and down the stairs, from Friday afternoon until Sunday evening.

I tried talking to them, calling the MPs, and finally playing my own music--Elvis Costello and the Dead Kennedys--as loud as my stereo would go, but that didn't bother any of them.  Their normal standard of living was set to "loud."

We just moved, eventually.  That was the only solution.  But for the 7 months we lived there, I bet my blood pressure was dangerously elevated.  I was under constant stress.  There was no place I could go, other than out on my bicycle in the countryside, to get away from the constant, hateful noise.  You have my sympathies, OP.

[alto_stratus]

Get yourself a CD of bagpipe music.  Blast in unison.  Consider blasting at 7am, if the point is not made.