I rented the ground-level apartment in my friend’s split level for a few years. The guys who rented upstairs owned a party lighting company, and as a result they usually came home from work around 3 AM. I worked a nine-to-five job, and I’m a fairly light sleeper. When they came home from work, they’d occasionally turn on the TV, and usually fairly loud, which would of course wake me up, but most of the time I could drown out the noise by turning on a fan in my bedroom.

This was annoying but I could deal with it……until one of their girlfriends moved in upstairs. This nasty such-and-such had no problem with turning up the volume on the TV all the way, in the middle of the night every night, and watching for hours. This was the early years of flat-screen TVs and they had a big one, so likely it was verrrry expensive. When I knocked on the door to ask them to turn it down, I was told ‘this is when we get home from work and we’ll do what we want’. Even having my friend, their landlord, intervene, had no effect.

Well, a few nights of one or two hours’ sleep made me downright ingenious. I remembered that once, while microwaving my dinner, I had started vacuuming the floor and having both appliances turned on tripped the circuit breaker. I crossed my fingers that we were on the same circuit and during the next morning’s 3 AM showing of Willy Wonka, with the girlfriend screaming “I love this movie!” and turning the volume up even louder than usual, I turned on the microwave and the vacuum. Five seconds and poof! Blessed silence! I heard a little shuffling around upstairs, then one of them went down into the basement and reset the circuit breaker.

The power came back on, and so did the television. I waited about a minute before turning back on the microwave and vacuum. Poof! Silence! They reset the circuit breaker again, but this time there was no more TV. I went back to the most blissful slumber ever.

My friend later told me that they complained to him about the power going out because it was such an expensive TV and that could damage the electronics. I told him that if they kept the volume to a respectable level then I wouldn’t have to do anything about it, but I wouldn’t hesitate to if it happened again. The microwave/vacuum trick was only necessary a couple more times before they got the hint and kept the noise down in the middle of the night.