This morning I was woken at 5:30 by the sound of a car horn honking. It was kind of a small, tinny type of honking, so it might have been a small older car or a motor scooter or something.
5:30 is practically broad daylight around the summer solstice, and the birds were in full squawking mode, and we sleep with our windows open whenever possible (because it's nicer and because it saves money on AC), so once I woke up, it was tricky to fall asleep again, what with the bright light, the birds, and...oh yeah, the fact that the jerk kept honking (intermittently) for about 10 more minutes.
We like where we live now partly because it's quiet. Our last apartment, which was downtown, was not only on a busy street, but was peopled with college kids who got drunk at night and yelled up at their roommates from the parking lot and so on. Our current complex is so quiet that when we get home at 10:30 on a Friday night, we whisper until we get inside.
What is hard for me to understand is how a person can think it's OK to wake up a whole neighborhood of people - our street is chockablock with apartments, so it's even more dense than a typical street with houses - in order to get the attention of their carpool buddy, or whatever the honking was about. It's pretty obvious to me that you can't honk a horn for 10 minutes at 5:30 AM in a residential area.
Whatever. I did get to sleep again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
"Apartment density" = a measure of how clueless one's neighbors are about appropriate behavior when living close to other people.
My old apartment was bad in this regard. When the office staff likes to blast loud (but usually good, I have to admit) music across the complex on weekend afternoons and evenings, it does not set a tone for restraint. It wasn't only the huge number of drunken college students (and drop-outs), but the band that liked to practice in the apartment below mine that was a problem. I kind of missed my drug-dealer neighbor when he left; he was always good about turning down his stereo when asked, if for no other reason than not wanting the cops called.
I haven't noticed any problems at my current apartment, where somebody called the cops on ME when the segment of the movie I was watching, in which two people pretended to have extremely loud sex in order to disturb their neighbors who often disturbed them by actually having extremely loud sex, disturbed my neighbors. At least everybody involved knew it was the TV and not me. I was pretty paranoid about TV volume for months after that. (Robert would probably say that I still am a bit of a Volume Nazi.)
I don't really notice from my house, but the apartments behind me have a lot of this car honking which I notice when I'm walking to the bus stop. (Actually, I haven't noticed this for a while.)
Back in the day, it seemed like the people in this complex used car pooling a lot more often than average people (because they're poor).
I had the fantasy of walking up to the honking guy and saying, "excuse me, which apartment is your rider in?" Then going to the apartment an knocking on the door. "You're ride is here. How long shall I say before you're ready?" Then go down to the driver and explain, "They'll be down in three minutes. There was a breakfast malfunction." And then leave.
Just to show them how it's done. I never actually do that, though.
Post a Comment