Apartment 202

Obsess:  To haunt or trouble in mind; beset; harass; preoccupy.

One of the things I highly recommend to newcomers and old timers and everyone in between – but never do myself – is to make a Problem List every day and write it down in a Problem Book of some kind.  This appears gruesome at first glance but I don’t mean it to be so.  The idea is to periodically review the Problem List so that you can see just how much time you waste worrying about things that never amount to a hill of beans, which devalues the hill of beans.  They don’t come anywhere near the worth of a good hill of pinto beans or red beans or Lima beans or black beans.  Black-eyed peas, maybe.

Actually, I do keep a journal in which I frequently write down the stuff that’s bugging me.  When I go back through and re-read the journal from time to time I invariably say: “Really?  Really?”  I can’t believe I devote so much time to such a load of crap.  And the date associated with each particular bitch is very helpful, too.  It helps me see how my bitching evolves and changes over time and then ends up right back where it started.

I’m amazed at how much time I spend worrying about noise coming in my environment.  If one of my neighbors is doing something that makes noise that I object to – which is any noise whatsoever - then I worry about it way too much.  Obsess is a word that comes to mind.  For instance, the owners of the apartment directly above us are doing some remodeling.  The building seems to have been constructed with special noise-transference material like concrete and steel that I assume has some stability and strength qualities important to a 10 story apartment building but which is doing nothing more than effectively transferring construction noise through the building and directly into my brain.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard a peep out of the residents who actually live there but the construction people are taking special pains to annoy the hell out of me. 

I surmise that they started by ripping out the entire kitchen; either that or they have been taking a collection of anvils and dropping them at strategic times and places from high places in the dwelling; they might have broken into the apartment still another story higher and drilled big holes in the floor so that they could drop the anvils from an even higher point.  And they had the dropping of these anvils or pianos or large chunks of concrete on a venomous schedule, too.  Sometimes they’d subject me to a flurry of constant, regular droppings.  Then there would be relative silence followed by a massive drop of an especially large anvil.  Normally they work steadily during normal business hours but sometimes a silence which lasts all day is broken by anvil dropping which lasts through the evening.  It is Chinese water torture.

After they tired with all of the anvil fun they went into a scraping and tapping mode.  People – multiple people, maybe hundreds of people – were moving randomly about the apartment and tapping and scraping with metal tools, targeting particularly sensitive sound transference points.  The tapping I can visualize; it could be one of a dozen different construction related activities.  The scraping baffled me.  Tap, tap, tap.  Scrape, scrape, scrape.  This sound was very steady.  The tapping/scraping people were very diligent with their activity.  They didn't take a lunch break.  They didn't take a smoke break or they smoked while they were tapping and scrapping.  I used to smoke when I was riding a bicycle so I know a person can tap and scrape and smoke all at once.  It's no big deal.

Growing weary of the irregular torture, they tried something new, to great effect.

Today there is a lot of pounding and high pitched, screaming, whirring cutting noises; I can only speculate on the material being cut: wood, tile,  . . .  well, that's all I can think of.  I imagine a band saw or a jig saw or the ominous rip saw.  I don’t know what any of these saws do.  I’m forbidden by SuperK Edict #2 to ever use any kind of saw whatsoever.  Because I can’t use a regular hand saw the thought of me using a saw powered by a motor is especially laughable.  I would cut off an important finger before that saw ever got anywhere near biting into wood.  I would cut the finger off setting the saw up.

I went up one day and knocked on the door.  The electrician let me in and showed me what he was doing.  He was pretty nice.  I mentioned that I might want to have some work done in my apartment some day – which is more lie than truth.  I was trying to get the electrician to like me and maybe not make so much noise.  He said the construction manager would get in touch with me, but I knew he wouldn’t.  That seems to be the nature of the beast.  He showed me why the activities he was engaging in was causing so much noise in my apartment which was edifying but not particularly helpful.

I went up the next day to talk to the scraping and tapping people.  They were actually removing tile from the floor and they weren’t quite so nice.  They looked tired.  I imagine it was hard work scraping tile off of a floor.  They didn’t offer up any information and continued to work as I snooped around a little bit.  I didn’t lie to them, at least, figuring what was the point since they didn't like me already. 

Now it’s the sawing and thumping.  I have enough construction friends.  I've left these people alone so far.

I know it’s going to end eventually.  I just wish I knew when.  I can take an incredible amount of pain as long as I’m in control of the process.  I think it’s the not knowing that is the worst part.

No, it's the noise.  That's the worst part.