My friend is a community journalist and was required to move to the suburb she was covering. There was a limited rental market and she found a cute, if dated, second-floor apartment.

The previous tenant had been an invalid elderly lady who had moved into a nursing home. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a crucial factor in this story.

The first floor tenant despised my friend immediately. She was a lonely woman who never had a single guest in the five years that my friend lived in the building. She was the type who over-decorated for every possible holiday. 20 scented candles in the front foyer, color coded to whatever obscure holiday it was; windows plastered with festive decals; lawn decorations; and bitterness in her heart!

The very first night that my friend lived there, the downstairs neighbor called the landlord because my friend was walking around her apartment and she could hear her. She complained that my friend would take her dog for a walk at 8pm and she could hear her. She objected to the fact that my friend smoked in her own apartment, even though it was not a non-smoking building. She had a fit when my friend parked in “her” space in the non-assigned parking lot. And she would call the building’s owner, no matter what time it was, to complain. She even called him once at 3am because she could hear my friend walking. My friend had gotten up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night!

My friend tried, she really did. She stopped smoking. She put down area rugs with thick pads. She always watched TV with headphones on. But the fact that she lived upstairs and moved around her apartment made this neighbor insane.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when my friend had a medical emergency that required surgery. While she was in the hospital, the landlord (who apparently had microscopic balls) called her to bawl her out because the downstairs neighbor complained to him that the EMTs “made noise” when they arrived and they didn't properly close the door behind them as they took my friend to the hospital for life-saving surgery.

That was it for my friend. While she was in the hospital, she looked online and made an offer on her own place — a small single-family home with a mortgage that ended up being cheaper than her rent. She gave her spineless landlord 30 days’ notice from her hospital bed.

The downstairs lady is undoubtedly still a miserable human being, but my friend ended up in a better place (literally!) She can walk around her place without getting nastygrams. She's building up equity in her home. And she's now a non-smoker.

Her last night in the old place, she was tempted to throw a bongo-drums-and-clog-dancing party — but decided to take the high road instead. Damn.