Not sure if this counts, but when I was in high school I was visiting my cousin. We worked on each other's cars.

So his neighbor had a beagle tied up in their yard that was freezing her little butt off. So of course the dog was crying.

The neighbor comes out and starts screaming at the poor dog, and hitting it.

So after it got dark, we went over and put the dog in my car and I drove home. When I explained to my mom what was going on, she readily accepted we had a new dog.

The poor thing was so abused you couldn't lift your arm in the same room as it for months. We had that dog for 10 years. It never did get over being shy, and would run and hide at the slightest raised voice.

I had an upstairs neighbor in my 2 family that was regularly using my laundry soap that lived in a storage basket by MY washing machine. Both machines were in the basement. She did a lot of laundry and I would have a full container of detergent then go down a week later to find it half empty. She always had a full thing of Tide so I don’t know why she used mine instead of her own. I tried putting the detergent more to the back of the washer, out of sight, but it kept happening. I used liquid detergent so one day, I filled what was left of the bottle with gel bleach and shook it up. I bought new detergent that I just kept in my laundry basket in the apartment. It took three day! She ruined not one, but two full loads of clothes. She was distracted putting the first load in the dryer and didn’t notice the bleached clothes and so started a second load with the same detergent. She was PISSED and confronted me, saying she had just needed to borrow some detergent that one time. I acted surprised and said, “Oh gosh! You should have asked! I needed the bleach bottle for something else so I just transferred it to my detergent bottle. I had no idea you would be using my detergent but if you had asked, I would have let you know that the bottle actually contained bleach.” She then asked if I was going to pay for her clothes and I just laughed and laughed and said, “Now aren’t you funny”!

I’ve had my share of bad neighbors but in one case the sneakiest thing I did was…….nothing.

I had a downstairs neighbor who at first was wonderful. Our daughters were the same age and went to the same school. All was good until the girls had a petty argument and the mom got involved. After that it was war. She called the landlord saying we were too loud, the noise from my shower kept her son awake, I parked too close to her car. My response was always unfailingly polite (kill ‘‘em with kindness). He finally told her to stop bugging him and work it out between us. She didn’t and decided to step up the harassment.

Her downfall came the day the police and CYS showed up at my door one day. My neighbor made a report that my daughter threw a rock at her daughter and it took 10 stitches to close the cut on her scalp. The police wanted to question my kids and CYS was there to take them away as my neighbor also told them we lived in squalor. I politely invited them in to my very clean apartment and asked if anyone wanted coffee. They all said no and asked me to produce my kids. I told them “Well that’s going to take a while since for the past month they have been in Florida with their dad. He has visitation with them for 2 months every summer. They’ll be back the middle of August if you want to wait.”

She was charged with making false reports to the police and CYS. They moved a few months later. Funny thing, the girls ended being friends again all on their own; the way it would have been without parental interference.

Many years ago I lived in an inner suburb of Sydney, in a terrace house.

The next door neighbour was an alcoholic bricklayer. Call him Don.

Don had decided to do some extensions, or renovations, and had three pallets of bricks dropped off in front of his place. They partially blocked the footpath and leaned outwards, dangerously overhanging the road.

One of the.pallets was in front of our house. Effectively our parking was blocked and the footpath was hard to negotiate.

The first Saturday they were there I knocked on his door, (interrupting a fight with his wife as he had accidentally lost her car the previous night, as far as I could work out he had parked it near a brothel and could not find it when he staggered out) and offered to help him shift the bricks around the back. He declined and said he would get to them during the week.

A few weeks went by. I offered again to help shift them, and got told to f off. I explained they were dangerous and inconvenient. Got the door slammed in my face.

I complained to the local council, and I suppose they sent him a letter, but the bricks remained.

By this time the bricks had been there about four months. The pallets were deteriorating and the stacks leaning. It was getting more dangerous by the day. It was only a matter of time before they collapsed on a car, a person or the busy road.

I wrote up a couple of large signs “ free bricks, help yourself” and put them on the pile about 6:am on a Saturday morning.

By the time Don surfaced around 11, there was probably half a pallet or so left… which he moved to his back yard.

I go

Many years back I was in primary school, I was nine. Our neighbour was one of my teachers and as luck would have it her son was in my class and a nasty piece of work. His idea of fun was to run up behind someone and if it was a boy hit them hard on the back of the head, if it was a girl he would put his hand up their skirt and try to grab their knickers he never got into trouble as his mother protected him. One day I saw him running up behind me so I turned and hit him, “tapped his claret" good and proper, after that his mother did everything she could to punish me, up to and including the slipper.

That winter (1963) was very cold, so one night I spent the night getting up and every quarter hour I sprayed her car with water. In the morning I was exhausted but her car had a huge layer of ice over the top, frozen solid about two inches thick. I do wonder if my parents ever realised why I was in such a rush to get to school next day when normally it took a bomb to get me out of bed.

So not really my neighbor, but his brother in law. The story is we lived on a cul-de-sac and apparently my neighbor’s brother in law lost his job so he, his wife and their 2 kids moved in to live with my neighbor until he could find work.

The only problem was they left their old beat up car parked sitting 2 feet from the curb and right at the end of our driveway. So every time we backed out of our driveway it took several attempts to get our car out without hitting his beater. I even asked a few times if they could at least move the car down a little or closer to the curb, but nothing ever happened and then one day I come home and the car, still sitting in the same spot has a flat tire. After the car continued to sit in the same place with the flat tire for 2 weeks, I called the sheriff and said that someone had apparently abandoned a car on our street.

We get home from dinner that night and surprisingly a sheriff deputy has shown up that very night with a tow truck and is hauling off the car. It was a pretty quiet street and everyone including my neighbor was standing in the cul-de-sac watching the show. The brother in law is trying to convince the deputy to leave the car, but mine was apparently not the only complaint and the deputy is not having any of it. The car is getting towed and he is going to have to pay to get it out of impound.

The only problem as soon as we get out of our car my five year old announces to the neighbor “my dad called the sheriff about that car”. I just looked at him and said sorry, I tried to get him to move it. He leaned in and said “no problem, thank you, I wanted to have it towed a month ago, I am just hoping they will move out now”. Sure enough the next week my neighbor’s house guests left.

How about making it look like they dialed 911, getting them raided without a call going over the police radio, and having them all arrested?

Let me preface this by saying that making a false 911 call is a serious crime, and doing so should not be taken lightly... unless of course you had no other choice, tried everything else, and are willing to suffer the consequences should you get caught.

My parents scraped every little bit they had together to buy a two-family house on a small quiet dead end road to have a safe place to raise their children. We had 14 houses of great neighbors, and one house of very nasty neighbors, the Dicksons. A whole family of dirtbags that rented an apartment in the house just before ours. Their 16 year old son, Junior, was friends with the overgrown child of a tenant we had when we bought our house. The tenant was in his 40’s and hung out with the teenagers next door. One of the first interactions we had with anyone in that family was when my mother caught Junior rummaging through our things in our private basement.

My father tried getting them to quiet down, but they got louder. He tried talking to the father to control his son, but his son was “a man now”, so the father had and desired no control in the house. They would have loud drinking parties with his son’s teenage friends clearly not old enough to drink and clear drug use of what kind we wouldn’t know until after the raid…

The police came several times, but it seemed the Dicksons lived with a police scanner in every room, so things got eerily quiet when a call came over the radio with their address. The father would claim not to know anything about the problem and would talk to “the boys”. The police were bothered by this, but couldn’t force their way into the apartment without a warrant or probable cause and nothing incriminating was ever left out in the open.

A neighbor’s child once called 911 accidentally and the police had to check the house for possible victims. Apparently a 911 call is probable cause for entry even if you answer the door and say everyone is ok. The police also didn’t dispatch cars to 911 calls or domestic abuse calls over the radio. The dispatcher would contact the officer with their Nextel phones or you’d hear the dispatcher telling the officer to call into the station. The public would not hear the person’s address for privacy purposes or possibly to not alert an aggressor.

This gave me the perfect opportunity as a nerdy 14 year-old. I knew all about phone systems and with the tips about the “privacy” policy the police had in place for 911 calls, I got to work. My mother and I took a bunch of pictures of the morons in the yard with kids drinking beer, and some glass pipes clearly not used for legal purposes, and got them developed.

The next Thursday night I went to work, like some super agent spy or something. I had it all planned out for a while beforehand. One night I connected two long thin wires to their phone box and left the ends in a bush where our yards met…

The wire ends were left in the bush until Friday night came along. I walked over, threw the envelope of pictures on the front stairs, twisted the wire connections to a cheap phone we had and dialed 911. Now the 911 operator would see the call as coming from the Dicksons’ phone line. I remember making it sound like I was crying and saying something stupid about a little girl, to which there were no girls at any of these parties. Then I twisted the wires together which is the equivalent of leaving the phone off the hook.

Soon thereafter the police showed up. Not one or two cars, but six local cars (which might have been all of them), two cars from the next town over, two staties, a fire truck, an ambulance, and then a couple unmarked or off-duty showed up. Nothing happened on the scanner until after they were already all on the scene. Both parents were arrested, the house was ransacked trying to find the girl, but instead finding strung out kids hiding in closets, a larger amount of drugs than any of us expected, and satisfaction. Junior was arrested for resisting and assaulting police officers. The street was completely impassible for anyone including the police trying to leave while for the next hour or two as the parents of the other kids came to claim their little delinquents. A couple of them had warrants and were also arrested on sight. I was scared out of my mind for what felt like weeks afterward.

My uncle had helped me with some of the planning including the tip about twisting the wires together afterward so 911 wouldn’t be able to call back. My father realized what I did rather quickly and I confessed as soon as he gave me that “Holy shit what did you do look”. He told me how horrible it was what I did, but that they deserved it and he hoped I would talk to him before trying anything like that again. When the police all finally left around 4 hours later, he went and plucked out the phone wires. He was laughing like a mad scientist telling my mother what happened when she came home from work. After several criminal charges and a nice article in the newspaper, the landlord finally kicked out his “perfect” tenants. We had almost 20 years of peaceful neighbors after that.

When I was a kid I used to be bullied by a bigger kid that lived down the road. At the weekend - in Summer - my Mum used to make me wear a silly hat outdoors to protect me from sunburn, and he always made fun of it…as well as push me around.

One day I hatched a cunning plan…

I would put my silly hat out the front of my house with a rock under it. Said bully will ride down the road on his bike after school, spot my silly hat and run over the hat and rock - and maybe fall off on the grass… What could go wrong?

Well it kind of worked…

He spotted the hat and aimed straight for it - but instead of running over it, he decided that he would drop his foot and kick it/scoop it up…

Unfortunately neither the hat nor the rock moved and he smashed every bone in his foot!

His parents were on the warpath - screaming at my parents - blaming me…

I just said that I had been out front and put the hat over a rock to stop it blowing away - and I had forgotten about it…

I think that he was in plaster for months!

The family eventually moved away and he never bullied or laughed at me again…

He knew it was me.

This was Central Florida, the lawns were St Augustine grass that with lot of water, mulching and fertilizer, they grew a couple inches a week, and the leaves are wide and tough unlike the soft lawns up north.

My neighbor disliked me because I built a 2 story house and that blocked the view of the lake. We worked for the same company and he was upset that I was hired in at a management level although he didn’t work for me.

Our lawns were about a 1/3 acre, so a Saturday cut and trim would easily take 3 hours with a normal lawn mower.

He bought a basic riding lawnmower, and he would drive his mower on my property, up to 5′ before making a U Turn. That was OK, except he would make the hard turn on top of my sprinklers. Almost every week, I had to replace the broken PVC pipe, digging up my lawn. I tried several things to dissuade him, but in the end on a Friday night, I brought home about 20′ of a high strength braided steel cabling. It was the smallest diameter I could find. I uncoiled it surrounding the sprinkler heads pushing down into the tall grass so you would never see it. But you would hear it, and I was in my garage when I knew he ran over it. The racket it made was frightening.

Even a 25″ blade on a 10 HP motor couldn’t cut it. But it did wrap it around the shaft and stalled the motor. All 20 feet of the cable was gone from my yard.

He had to push his mower to the garage, and spent the rest of the day disassembling his mower to untangle the mess.

That was the last time he went on my lawn.

I have posted this before. There was a rental unit next to my home, and the tenants were meth heads. They threw a noisy party one evening and it got later and louder. I asked them to turn it down, and finally called the cops. They shut up for about a half hour and started back. I went back to have a chat with them, and saw that much of the noise was coming from a car with the stereo on and the windows down. All the partiers were inside with another stereo blasting. I turned off the engine, took the keys, turned on the headlights, walked across the street and threw their keys in the creek. The next morning they woke me up again arguing about who had lost the keys. Did I mention this car had blocked in three other party goers also? They could not move the car so all four were stuck. (They could not get the steering wheel to unlock without keys). When they finally got some keys from somewhere the car would not crank because I had turned on the headlights which burned the rest of the night.

Don’t f*ck with grouchy old curmudgeons; we need our rest.

Not me but…

In the early 80s in a nearby neighbourhood, was a couple of kids that liked to blow up letterboxes. My friend's dad, who lived across the road from them, built a new one out of welded 1/4″ plate steel, all painted up nice.

One night, the kids put a copper bomb in it and lit the fuse. The bomb turned into a missile and flew across the road, right through the front window of the kids’ house, landing on the living room floor before burning the carpet. Apparently, their dad chased them around the neighbourhood for an hour after that, telling them that they would be sleeping in the garage!

The letter box survived with a few burn marks.

Many years ago I worked night shift, 10 hours a night. For some reason my wife and the next door lady were feuding. Next door neighbor had a little boy of about 10 years old and a newborn, her husband was a plumber who worked long days at least 6 days a week. During the day the neighbor would give her little boy old pots & pans and have him beat the crap out of them in their driveway making a bunch of noise right near our bedroom window. This went on for weeks and only happened on days I had to work that night.

Working nights, staying up late for me was fairly normal and one night around 1am I heard their newborn fussing, screaming and crying a lot. Around 3am the baby finally settled down. Once I was quite sure the baby was finally sleeping, I got out a roll of 1000 firecrackers and set them off right outside the baby's window. At 6:30am the baby was still screaming and could probably be heard 3 houses down. The plumber stayed home from work that day due to no sleep. The little boy never made another noise by our bedroom window.

Technically speaking I didn't get caught, but I'm sure they knew.

I’m a disabled Vet living in a trailer park.

I have a small yard, but because of physical limitations, it takes me two days to mow my yard.

The second day I went out to finish mowing and noticed that my gas can was gone. I looked all over for that darn thing before realizing that someone had stolen it.

I went and got a plastic gas can, it has to be plastic… I put one gallon of gas in it, then a can of Drano, (Caustic soda), and finished filling the can with water.

I left it out overnight, and lo and behold, it was gone.

At the weigh station a mile toward town, there was a little white car sitting to the side. My gas can was in the back seat.

I laughed my Ass off.

Two weeks later it was finally gone. I went over to my neighbor, Larry, and asked him if he knew who’s car that was. He did. So I told him what I had done.

The next day he told me that the cars owners were going to sue me. I said fine! Let them explain to the judge why they were stealing gas from a Disabled Vet.

I never heard another word about it, and I could leave ANYTHING out in the yard after that, and no one would touch it.

Years ago, I lived in a basement apartment. A young woman moved in the apartment directly above. She had a two year old son. I had no real problem with her, but she was a white trash kind of girl. Some weekends her father and friends would come over, and they would all go out drinking, come back to her place and drink some more. They were loud and obnoxious. More than once , I opened my door and found my neighbor from across the hall, standing out there as well. We were being kept awake at 3am by this bunch of retards. One night, I had enough. I went into the utility room next door, found the power switch to her apartment, and pulled the switch. There was huge laughter from that apartment as they all thought the power had gone out. But it quieted down very quickly. When you’re really drunk and the lights are out, you tend to pass out. Not sure if she ever figured it out.. but the loud parties didn’t happen again.

My neighbour had been asking me to clear my side of the gutter as he felt it was pushing all the water his way, he’s an unpleasant man but his wife is vile so I ignored it for months but eventually booked someone to do it.

There’s one down pipe that runs from my side over to his property, he had some work done and he disconnected it and redirected it to mine but left his down pipe in place while the work was being done on his property. This was the day before the guy was supposed to clear my gutters, as part of the booking it also covered minor repairs. When the guy turns up I ask him to rejoin where it has somehow become disconnected which he duly did.

The look on my neighbour’s face was great but the look on his wife’s face was priceless. It made up for the three years of shit they’ve been shovelling our way.

Not my proudest moment…. But in my 20’s:

There were five or six guys, foreign Univ. students, living below me in a condo complex. They took all the parking including mine with new Porches, Lambos, etc. These cars would last maybe two weeks. First you’d see a dent, then a bigger dent, then the car would disappear and be replaced by another new one in a different color.

I didn’t really care, but they hung out on the stairs every day and would not let me pass to get to and from my vehicle. They’d pinch my arms and grab at me, saying stuff I can only assume wasn’t nice. The landlord didn’t care, he was getting well paid. These guys had diplomatic immunity, so normal or official reactions were a moot point. The final straw was over laundry… There were maybe 8 washers in the laundry room, one Sat. morning I took my stuff and put it in two of them, then returned to my place. I waited 30 min’s then returned to put everything in the dryer.

When I got there, I saw all of my clothes strewn all over the floor, wet, and they’d been walked on. I opened the washers I’d used to see that my neighbors below had put their stuff in there instead, it was all light colored…. All the washers were now taken. They were laughing and joking on the stoop when I returned with my armload of soaking wet and soiled clothes. One of them pinched my arm, another pulled my hair. That’s it, I was done. So… off to the store. I bought ten bottles of neon pink Rit dye…

The next Sat. I left my condo before they got up with my neon pink dye in hand and hid my vehicle on the other side of the complex. I checked the laundry room, (nobody was using it). Then I waited in ambush, reading in the rec. center where I had full view. Sure enough, here they all came with their laundry. After they left the laundry room, I put 2 -3 bottles of the dye in each of their washers.

The display that followed was pretty epic. One was screaming and ripping / rending the pink garments, another was insanely throwing them in the pool. Another ran to the manager’s office, I could hear him screaming in a foreign language. Someone called the police. I’m not sure at all what followed that day, but they moved out before noon.

Would I choose that same response or path today? No…

It was not my neighbor, in fact, no one I knew. I used to have a small business and by the strip, mall rules had to have a dumpster. Well, it seems the neighbours saw this as a place to dump their garbage for free. We paid by the load, not weekly or monthly. When it was full call and they pick it up, weighed it and we got a bill so… their garbage cost me money.

I left notes on the dumpster, everything I could think of and then that was it -- one day had enough. So instead of going home I dragged the bags out and went through it piece by piece: eggshells, coffee grounds, putrid this and that, and then I found what I was looking for - an envelope with a name and address. Made sure I found more than one. Packed it all back up and went and found the address. It was late and being the nice guy I am I didn't want to disturb the people so I put the garbage on their front lawn, making sure every bag broke and spread around a little. No issue ever again.

Thanks so much! I cannot believe the response I have never got this many upvotes. thanks so much.

It was 1994, just after I moved to Indonesia with my family. The neighbours kitchen backed onto our garden and every morning around 4am their maids played loud music while they were cooking etc. Indonesians get up very early for morning prayers.

Several times we asked the neighbours nicely about having their helpers turn down the volume of the early morning music, but it never happened.

So, when we were heading away for a 3 week vacation, I bought a ghetto blaster, a mechanical timer and an extension cord. I wrapped it all up in a plastic bag and hung it from a mango tree just near their kitchen. The timer was set to go on and off every 15 minutes from midnight to 4am. The volume was full and the radio tuning dial was set to just off the radio station, so it was nice and distorted.

Came back from vacation and never heard a sound from them again.

Pavlov’s Neighbor

It’s been a long time since this went down so I guess I can share it now.

About 12 years ago I had a neighbor that would blast his music. In the beginning it was only a little annoying but over the course of a several weeks the volume level increased, as did my sensitivity to the noise. At first I tried to be a good neighbor, and I tolerated it without complaint. I would just turn up my TV to be able hear it over his music.

In my experience problems generally don’t solve themselves, in fact if left alone they usually get worse. That was certainly true in this case. Not only did the music get louder, its duration grew longer and persisted later into the evenings. I tried to reason with my neighbor, which initially yielded some success - but the upward climb of the volume, and the general downward decline of the situation continued.

Tucked away in a recess near my back door was the solution to my dilemma: a panel that was the main power for my townhouse as well as his. At approximately 11PM on a weekday night I said fuck it and I flipped his breaker.

This was a dick move on my part. I offer no excuses, but I make no apologies either.

There was some arguing on the other side of the wall regarding “not paying the fucking bill” but otherwise there was sweet silence.

The next day the landlord knocked on my door. I was sure that I was busted.

“I think the next unit has a tripped breaker. Do you mind if I access the panel to check?”

“Not at all. Do whatever you need to do.”

And just like that my neighbor's power was back on and eventually the blaring music too. I tried to tolerate the situation as I had before but when I got really frustrated, pushed to the edge, I would shut off his power again.

These passive aggressive, pseudo random shut offs continued for a while until I realized that instead of using the breaker as a weapon, I could use it as a tool. In other words; I could do better. I chose a volume level that I was willing to tolerate and when my neighbor exceeded that level I would turn off his power.

Every. Single. Time.

Over the course of several iterations I trained my neighbor to associate his volume level with the power outages. And thus, by apparent necessity, he could only play his music at reasonable levels. Lasting peace had finally been restored to my household.

My neighbor apparently got a parking ticket for parking in the ‘no parking zone’ in front of his house. We often parked there for a few minutes to run inside and pick up something.

I came back to my car and found a parking ticket under my wiper blades. Whoops. Busted! Before I paid it I examined the ticket more carefully . It wasn’t for my car. It was for my tricky neighbor’s car. He apparently moved it from his wind shield to mine.

Rather than putting a check in the self-addressed ticket envelope, I stuck a hand written note in the envelope that said; “you can take this ticket and shove it.”

That note got a quick reaction from the police department.

:)

Consequence: You can bet his license plate number was in every police car - with an explanation - plus penalties and fines

In 82 was a cook at the Bright Angel at the Grand Canyon. Had a ex marine friend who had been in Vietnam, was assigned to the camp closest to the DMZ. It frequently got over run. My friend was there one night when it was, he had a bunch of bullet wound scars across his arm and chest. Said those NVA were big guys. But he healed and was a good cook, kept his 10 inch chef knife and spatula in a towel and slept next to it in a two man room. It was across the hall from mine. We went to work at 6am and he was always cheerful, but then I noticed he was really grumpy and asked why. They had put a young pup in his room and he was keeping him awake to all hours.

The next time I was in the dorm room and saw this guy enter his room, I ran over and put my foot in the door. He was surprised and I asked if my friend was there. He said no. I then proceeded to tell him about my friend and what he had been through. Night fighting. and getting severely wounded. Then I mentioned that he had PTSD and slept right next to his knives, wrapped up in that towel right next to his bed. That he should be really careful cause he could set him off and end up getting repeatedly stabbed. I then left.

The kid started going to bed early and even taking his shoes off in the hall and tiptoeing from the door to his bed, he never was a problem again.

A week later as we were smoking a joint I told my friend what I had done. We laughed till we cried.

I call it a mind f***. It is the best.

When I was about 10 the neighbor boy broke into my garage and stole my and my brothers bikes. This was really the last straw for me, the kids in that house were monsters and terrorized the neighborhood. This was in San Diego navy military housing, I'm a navy brat. So the electrical breaker boxes were all located outside of the dueplex housing units for some reason not inside like I've seen every other house since, and almost nobody bothered to put little locks on them. Kids used to flip breakers for fun at times to annoy people. I opened up the box on the side of their house took my huge super soaker water gun and hosed down the breaker box. It made LOTS of noise and some sparks flew about and I took off. Well they lost power for like two weeks, while maintenance worked to fix everything, they had to throw away all of the food in their fridge were unable to shower or cook ect. Shore patrol launched an investigation, but the people that knew it was me said nothing, as I was well liked and they weren't. I didn't get caught, my dad knew I did it but didn't let on that he knew, and I got in no trouble. Looking back now I realize just how stupid a thing this was to do as I could have easily been electrocuted and killed doing this. I actually had forgotten all about this until I saw this question.

Many years ago we were living in Florida and had a neighbor that was clearly mentally ill. He was paranoid and also extremely aggressive. It started with our pets being poisoned and escalated from there. We had the main electric feed to the property cut, water turned off and padlocked, damage to plants and landscaping on the property line etc. I installed an extensive security system (45 cameras with night vision and sound) after which things calmed down for a while. The next thing was a handicapped parking zone installed for him (he was allegedly handicapped) not in front of his house but in front of ours! That was the last straw. I hired a private investigator and had him followed 24/7 for months. Yes it was expensive but it was worth it. Finally his next move was to take us to court for code violations and use of his (personal?) parking space. During the court proceedings we presented all the blueprints and permits and sign offs that showed everything we did was within the law. However he made a huge pain of himself especially when it was clear he was losing. Finally he claimed we blocked his view of the ocean which while untrue required the entire courtroom to pay a visit to his home to see his alleged lack of a view. Unbeknownst to him we had done a full investigation of the history of his property including permits, construction and violations. Once on his property which was 2 stories he could not make his case for the lack of view since ours was 3 stories. However he made it very clear he had built fully from lot line to lot line and installed windows overlooking his neighbors on both sides (a clear violation). In the end he managed to prove to the court that his entire renovation of 1/3 of his building was completely illegal and the original property was built 4 feet too close to the lot line. The court ruled he would have to apply for a variance and no matter what the result was he had to eliminate all windows on the lot lines. If the variance was denied he would be required to demolish the addition done without permits. He would also have to apply for a hardship variance for the original property as he purchased it. In the end he got his hardship variance but lost the battle for the new construction which he had to remove at great expense. We also got the handicapped parking removed since we had him on camera clearly not handicapped.

The moral of the story:

People in glass houses (or illegal ones) should never throw stones (or lawsuits).

About 30 years ago, I lived downstairs from a family I was close to. Maybe once a month we’d have friends over for a barbeque/pool party. It was always in the afternoon & was usually over around 9 pm. None of us drank or smoked; we’d just enjoy each other’s company.

There was an elderly couple who lived across the street. The husband seemed like a nice enough guy, but his wife was always complaining to us about our friends - they left cigarette butts on their lawn (remember, none of us smoked), we were loud (party over by 9 pm), etc. What she REALLY didn’t like was that our friends would park in front of their house (public street & they had a private driveway for their vehicles). They started to put out empty 5 gallon buckets along the curb to prevent anyone from parking there. One night, I was really done with her attitude. About 3 am I went out & planted flowers in their empty 5 gallon buckets without them knowing it. When they went out the next morning & saw the flowers, the looks on their faces was priceless! I casually commented to them as I left for work saying “Nice flowers!” There was a long pause, then the husband said “Thanks!” She never complained to us again & they took care of the flowers all summer!

I had a friend who got back at a Neighbor From Hell. The awful neighbor would harass people on the block constantly - calling the code compliance officers to cite them for having their grass one inch too high, calling the cops for “loud music” which was not that loud - all kinds of trivial shit. My friend called in ads to the paper for huge “moving sales” at that house - “Husband just died, everything must go - many guns, five year old Harley Davidson, many tools - come early, bang on the door.” So, all these rough bikers would come roaring to the house at 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning. My friend also arranged for the Mormons, Moonies and Jehovah’s Witnesses to come at late hours. My friend also arranged for lots of goods and services to come to the house of the Neighbor From Hell. Finally, my friend arranged for HORRIBLE porn to come to the neighbor - only he put the address the of jerk’s next door neighbor on the porn magazine (you don’t want to know the nature of this porn). After a few months of harassment, the Neighbor From Hell sold his house and moved. My friend innocently asked “Why are you moving?” The bully answered “Ah, this neighborhood is going to pot.”

In a small West Texas town Dad owned 2/3 of the block and an old single wall wooden house that had an additional stone wall added. The other 1/3 belonged to a man who regularly plowed for his garden and treated Dad’s emply side lot as if it were his. Dad tasked me with putting in 4 “ schedule 80 pipe fence post . He had welded legs on the bottom of the post. One nice winter day I when over to Dad’s dug the holes as best I could . I hit flint and ruined a heavy pinch bar. The tops were not even, but I had filled the deep holes to 3 “ from the top with concrete and filled the posts also guessing on the tall posts. Dad cut the tops in 4 triangles and welded then closed and even tops on the fence.

Springs comes and dad’s neighbor comes to plow his garden. Dad had angle iron welded between the post and barbed wire 5 rows. His neighbor attempts to run over the posts. He dings his tractor these are not wooden post he used to run over. He hooks up a chain and can not move the posts. Neighbor is mad and now has bent the angle iron. The town has only 1 sleepy policeman so dad calls the sheriff . Deputy comes and the Neighbor says that Dad put up a fence on his land. Dad shows both of them the property stakes and wants a report written for damages to his fence. Neighbor says he has been using the property for years. Dad has his reciepts from the letters he had sent telling the neighbor to stay off his land. The complaint is written and neighbor billed for the damage.

My roommate and I lived in a 'garden’ apartment. Our upstairs neighbors, an elderly couple, got drunk and had knockdown drag out fights every night between 3–5am.

My roommate had enough. He'd noticed the man left his shoes in the hall when he was home, so he started putting stuff in them. Marshmallow fluff, Cheese wiz, dogshit, a dead mouse. Always far toward the toe, far enough in that you couldn't see it. Had an ingenious baffle system to keep the liquidy stuff from going to the heel and being seen, but did nothing to protect the foot.

Took the guy a week, but he stopped leaving his shoes outside, and they moved a month later. Since they had pissed off neighbors on either side, across the hall, up and down stairs, they never figured out who did it. I kinda doubt they looked.

The worst I ever did was pour sprite all over a neighbours front car window during the night so it would have time to dry before they had to go to work. They had no clue what it was and they stopped parking their car in the back of the building. The reason why I did it, every morning at 4:30am…am…while running their car for 15 minutes and playing music so loud it would shake my windows with the base. I was the only one that had issues because my unit was the only one in the back right next to the parking area. I spoke to the landlord many times but nothing changed. So I spilled the sprite. I never got caught, and I was never woken up at 4:30am by that man again. I regret nothing…lol.

My wife and I were newly married (1970) and rented our first place, a garage apartment. It overlooked the landlord’s house and a fence surrounded his back yard. All was well until the landlord brought home a dog for his son. The dog was an “inside” dog but the landlord would let the the dog out the back door at night to relieve itself. The landlord forgot to let the dog back in a few times and the dog would yelp endlessly (sometimes all night long). Naturally, we couldn’t sleep with all this barking going on. And we didn’t want to find another place because rental properties at that time were very scarce. After another night of barking, I rolled over in the bed, picked up the phone and called the landlord’s number. When he picked up, I hung up. As the dog kept barking, I kept calling the landlord’s phone and hanging up. Finally, the landlord put two and two together, came outside and brought the dog back inside. We never saw or heard the dog again. Problem solved. Psychology 101 paid off that night!

My youngest, during their first year at university, lived in a flat of eight people in a hall of residence. There were various incidents over the months with food stolen, utensils and pans borrowed but not washed up, too much noise late at night, items left in front of their door. No big issues but constant irritations.

As it was a university owned hall of residence, cleaners came in weekly to attend to the communal areas. Every couple of weeks the admin would email those in the flat to say that the state of the kitchen was appalling and that nothing could be stored in the corridor as it presented a risk should there be a fire. After nearly two terms of threatened sanctions my youngest replied to the admin email saying please carry out the threats. The next day the kitchen was cleared and cleaned and every item vanished from the corridor. The messy flat mates had to retrieve their possessions around lectures and at the convenience of the admin team.

25 years ago my husband and I rented a house for a year until we could save a down payment to buy a home. Our neighbors driveway and ours were side by side and rather long, but required a little car jockey at times. The neighbor suggested we stagger our vehicles and they could get in our driveway and back out and vice versa. That worked out really well until our neighbor died. When our new neighbors moved in it was an older couple and their adult son and they didn't like that suggestion at all. Within a week there was a chain link fence from the road to the rear of the property and no trespassing signs every 10 feet or so. Ooookay. No fencing anywhere else so they weren't trying to keep a pet safe or anything, just making sure we didn't use a smidge of their property. There was street parking also and you could only back in one direction because the fence was literally to the road. I left one day to get groceries and when I got home there was a police car in their driveway. I carried bags in and went back out to get the rest and walked right into a pair of cops and the adult (using that term loosely) son. He began ranting the moment I walked out and the officers had to literally step between us. Apparently I had demolished his fence with my reckless driving. So we walk over and they ask him to point out this demolition and he had one of the little metal rods with the reflector that my bumper was supposed to have mangledand a scratch that he kept pointing at that I nor the officers could see. Then he said I left the scene of the accident and he wanted me arrested immediately. One officer picked up the reflector and poked it back in the ground and this guy went berzerk. He took his little cordless phone and called the cops on the cops and was screaming that I wanted to act like a snob and pretend I didn't know him when I did and that I used my feminine wiles to get the first set of cops to destroy the evidence. During all this hullabaloo my husband and younger brother pulled in as my brother was working my job at our business and I thought my husband was going to kill this fruitcake. Turns out he was one of my little brother's school friends and he was mad that I didn't recognize him. I moved out long before my brother graduated and never paid a bit of attention to his friends. Hello, I was into my friends. My brother finally got him calmed but he insisted I be arrested and he wanted a report and planned to sue me. I'm in the yard crying over my spoiled groceries and the prospect of possibly having to give birth to my son in jail. Yes I was 38 weeks PREGNANT and YES my husband was livid. We were told by the officers no report was happening and gave us their cards if anything happened and to try to not even let my shadow fall across his damned fence. Our job was installing kitchens and bathrooms and every chance he got my hubby would toss a handful of nails or screws through the fence. I wonder to this day if they ever figured out why they kept getting flat tires.

This story involves a friend of mine, John. John had nightmare next door neighbours, they would bang doors at all hours, play music loud whenever they felt like it and just didn’t care less about the noise.

John is a musician friend; a real character of a guy, he is also the proud owner of some serious musical production gear. He has a full studio in a soundproofed room in his basement. No one knew it was there, especially his neighbours from hell. He also owns a lot of public address systems, amps, speaker cabinets etc…

We were going on a tour for two weeks and John was coming with us. Although he wasn’t an actual member of our band, he wanted some spare cash. Our usual bass player had hurt his left hand by trapping it in a door, he happily let John stand in for him for these few gigs.

As we picked up John at his house and loaded his stuff in the van, he joined us in the front with his phone in his hand, squinting at the screen. This was unusual for John; he hated his phone with a passion.

‘Everything okay John?’ I quizzed.

‘Yeah, one sec,’ he said looking into his phone, ‘1, 2, 3 and go.’

We heard a noise come from his house of dogs barking.

‘Right let's go,’ he said grinning.

‘Where’s those dogs barking from?’ asked Tom, a band mate.

‘My house,’ John replied.

It seemed John had had enough of his neighbours and had found a music sample of dogs barking whilst using his music software. He set it on a loop to go off at all times of the day through speakers facing the neighbour's wall. Evidently, he could control it from his phone too.

When we got back off tour, John received a visit from the RSPCA stating they’d had reports of dogs being neglected at the property. John assured them no dogs lived there, which they didn’t. He invited them to view his property from upstairs to down.

As the RSPCA left apologetically John watched them drive away in their van, he pressed his phone and continued the onslaught.

The neighbours moved out soon after.

*** EDIT. Thanks for the upvotes for this story, I have relayed this back to John who thinks you are all top people for appreciating it. He’s not on Quora, when I told him about it, he thought Quora was a vegetarian mince. I reassured him that was Quorn. He has, however, opened up about other stuff he did to ‘those scumbags next door’, as he described them. I will re-edit with an updated adage. Thanks again. ***

Adage: I hope you can get the gist of this; I may edit to explain better as time progresses.

A few weeks previous to this and towards the build-up of John’s actions with his ‘who let the dogs out’ tribute act, there had been an occurrence of what he described as ‘parking wars’.

The nightmare neighbours were students but they certainly weren’t the ‘studious’ type. The house had visitors at all hours and many people would come and go from there all the time. Judging from John's explanation, one of them was a well-known local drug dealer. Consequently, cars would pull up outside all the time and be gone a few minutes later. Weekends were different, cars would be there from Friday to Sunday night and the noise next door was unreal.

John was a hardworking musician, he worked with a few bands, including us, and he was rarely at home for more than a few days at a time.

One weekend night/early morning he came home from working and went to pull up near his home. He had a load of equipment that he needed to take into his cellar from his small van.

No chance.

There were cars parked all around his house and you could hear the music from his neighbours a block away. As he drove around, the only available space was taken by someone spreading an old ‘ex-postal service’ van over two spaces. This was literally just outside his cellar door, just at the side of his house.

To explain, John lived on the end of a street that attached itself to the side of a very steep hill.

He decided if he could ‘jump’ the van down the hill a bit then he could have enough room to park his little van above it, up the slope. He got out of his van and jumped up and down on the back step of the postal van to make the back wheels jump up and down. This relieves the weight on the handbraked rear wheels and allows gravity to roll the car down the hill on its un-braked front wheels. The term used to describe this is called ‘bumping the car’. It is easier when two people do it as you can get more of a bigger jump, but it is possible with one if gravity lends a hand, as in this case.

John said it worked; the van edged slowly down the hill with every jump in the air.

Due to Johns lack of detail taking at the time, the front wheels were turned slightly towards the middle of the road and as the van moved forward, it also moved out into the open road.

That was when disaster struck. With a ‘click’, the handbrake cable on the van snapped. It was an old van, and the gradient of the hill must have taken its toll on its old braking system. The van straightened it’s wheels on the opposing kerb and careered down the hill for about 10 seconds. It smashed into a brick wall protecting a nearby train line. John just looked down the hill in disbelief, parked his van in the newly available space and went in.

The morning after, the police had come to remove the van. They were stood there with the owner of it, a very disgruntled young man giving them details whilst they did so. It seems the van was owned by the aforementioned ‘drug dealer from next door’. The police arrested him as they found Class As in the back of it.

He was using the van for local drug drop offs. The crash must have dislodged them from somewhere. From what John tells me, they were visible to an early dog walker who phoned the police about the van.

He reckons it’s the most effective karma he’d ever unknowingly served on the ‘arseholes next door’(as he described them).

I really had to agree.

Thanks again for reading, please don’t try any of this at home.

** After much deliberation and thought I decided to sit down with John and, as suggested in the comments, write a book about some of the scenarios he/we have been involved in throughout the years. I’ve never had a day where we’ve both laughed so much about the past, it was a real tonic. Anyway, the book is aptly called ‘The Book of John: A Bassist’s Bible’. John reckons we may get some ‘bible bashers’ buying it out of error but we don’t really care to be totally honest! The book is available on the short story app ‘Novellea’ under this title. Thanks again for reading. Oh by the way, it is totally free to read. **