Neighbor Drama

This post will most likely end up with an explicit rating. You've been warned.

The following is an account of the events that took place at approximately 10:30 p.m. Saturday, August 25. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Saturday night, we had friends from Boston that were in town for a wedding stay the night. We invited another couple over for small gathering to watch some movies, eat snacks and have a generally good time. We were in between movies, making brownies and getting a little loud when there was a knock on the door. We weren't expecting any more guests, so I was quite curious to know who could be at the door at this hour. I thought perhaps a friendly neighbor thought we were being too loud (we weren't) and wanted to alert us to this fact. It was not a friendly neighbor. There were, in fact, two police officers standing on our porch when I opened the door.

My immediate thought was, "Were we really that loud?", when he asked for Martha Johnson, our friend from Boston. At first I was relieved because the complaint was obviously not with us, but with our friend. I should point out that the officers were very nice and not trying to be assholes, so I didn't have a problem with providing him Martha's whereabouts. She came to the door and he proceeded to hold up her car keys. I should pause yet again to explain that Martha can be somewhat, nay, very scatterbrained, so I was not surprised to see her keys held up by the officer. We all had a good laugh until we heard the officer explaining the reason they were there.

Apparently her car was "blocking" the driveway of our neighbor. She was also parked too far from the curb, a ticketable offense. Martha, in addition to being scatterbrained, is also a notoriously bad parker/driver, so again, not a shock. The shock came from the fact that she had "blocked" the neighbor's driveway by less than 3 inches. And not even the straight line of the driveway, but the angled slope that leads to the main street. So, the asshole next door couldn't pull out of his driveway (he always backs in, which we think is weird) without having to take some care to not hit a closely parked car, and decided to involve the authorities.

Now I normally wouldn't really have a problem with this...no, I take that back and here's why. Remember, there were two officers on the porch and these guys always travel solo. So that means there were two cop cars outside our house at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night. Add to that the fact that we live in a nosy neighborhood and the people across the street were on their front porch at the time...makes for quite a bit of unnecessary neighborhood embarassment. We're upstanding young people, the most we could be found fault with is letting the front lawn grow a bit too much before mowing or yelling at the dogs a little too loudly. We don't throw huge, loud parties that clog the street with cars and keep people up at night. Granted we don't know everyone in the neighborhood, but we've only lived here for about 18 months; we're private people.

Also, why wouldn't you come knock on our door yourself? The car was parked in front of our house, wouldn't it be safe to assume that it belongs to someone there? The only thing I can think of is that he assumes we don't like him (we don't now) but we've never done anything to show him that we don't. I can only guess that he pulled this stunt because he does not like us, but I cannot imagine why.

Other problems I have with all of this: the guy only recently moved in, he's probably been here less than 6 months. I can understand someone who has lived in the neighborhood calling the cops on somone who has only recently moved in, but hey...we were here first, jerk! He also has friends over quite often and instead of them parking in his driveway or even in front of his house, they most often park in front of our house! I normally don't mind people parking in front of our house, we don't own the street and no one has a huge driveway. But I would never park in front of someone else's house if there is open space in front of the house we're visiting. The other thing, and this more of a pet peeve, is they park in the ass middle of the space, when there's plenty of room for two normal size cars.

We just can't help thinking that he called the cops to embarass us, and that is infuriating.