Last Updated on January 29, 2022
If you’re ‘fortunate’ enough to live near neighbors who don’t mind rattling your windows with loud music past 2 am, what do you do?
I have a thing about loud music, I freely admit. It started, of all places, in church.
A few years ago, I was part of a worship team where I was apparently a valued team member. Then one day, it was decided we had to computerize and pre-program everything and I was essentially replaced. So I moved from a semi-enclosed tech booth to the audience where there was no sound baffling or walls between me and the speakers.
And I began to realize how loud the music actually was.
Recently, I had a minor bout of tinnitus, a condition commonly called “ringing in the ears.”
In my case, it wasn’t ringing. It was a loud, constant tone, sort of like the test signal you hear when you see color bars on a television station that’s temporarily off the air.
After a quick visit to my ear, nose and throat doctor, he decided I had a little too much pressure in the Eustachian tube of my right ear, which can cause the ringing. I left with a prescription and within a day, I was already feeling relief.
Since that happened fairly recently, maybe I’m just overly sensitive to loud music.
But loud music at 2:30 am is just wrong.
A neighbor — apparently they’re a neighbor, but I just don’t know exactly where they live — decided it would be nice to sit out in their expensive sports car that was parked across two spaces in the parking lot and blast loud music from their car.
Actually, I don’t know if it’d qualify as music. There was a definite bass beat, but that’s the only thing I could discern as I tried to get to sleep.
Frankly, I like a variety of music. Most genres, in fact. I truly don’t care what kind of music other people prefer or when they prefer to enjoy it…as long as it’s not forced on me. I wouldn’t blare music at 2 am for my neighbors to suffer through.
Other people, apparently, aren’t as considerate.
What do you do?
Call 911? It doesn’t strike me as that level of “emergency.”
Call the property manager? I get an answering machine instead of the answering service they apparently no longer have. Not much help.
Walk outside and demand they turn it down (or off)? I don’t know who these people are and somehow that doesn’t seem all that good of an idea.
Report them the next day? Oh, I took care of that, you may be sure.
But at 2:30 am, when you’re just trying to get to sleep and you can hear that bass beat despite the fact that all of your windows are closed and there’s the added noise of a fan running in your room, you just want it to stop.
Right that minute.
I’m a little crabby this morning. But I’d expect nothing less, since I didn’t get the kind of sleep I would have liked to get.
I’m also at a complete loss to understand how someone can be so intentionally inconsiderate of others.
Taking up two parking spaces is bad enough.
But to be so completely unaware or uncaring about playing loud music like that into the night?
How do you get there? How do you become that out of touch?
I don’t begin to understand it. But maybe that’s just me.
