In the 1980s, we had upstairs neighbors who were very loud, rude and belligerent, but when we complained to the building manager they didn’t want to have anything to do with it. My eight-month pregnant wife and I were even threatened with a rifle and we are still waiting for the police to respond.

I was nearing the end of my assignment at this particular base, so we just put up with it and bided our time until we could get out of there. (Little background now. We had had trouble with our stove at one point and I watched the repairman to see what he did to fix it. He started by turning the power off to the entire apartment by going to the rear of the building and throwing the breaker to our particular unit. Each breaker was in a metal enclosure, well marked with the apartment number, but it was not secured it any way. The repairman then placed a little lock and tag on the breaker to make sure it couldn’t be accidentally turned back on.) On our last day in the apartment, as we were loading the cab with our suitcases, I ran out back of the building, used a lock that I had bought just for this occasion and turned the power off to the offending neighbor’s apartment and locked it. Closing the metal enclosure made it look like nothing had been disturbed. I then ran to the cab and we went to the airport. No, I wasn’t there to see what happened next, but it is my sincerest hope that they had a very hard time figuring out just what had happened and were equally frustrated at not finding us there to accuse.