There’s an unspoken rule in any neighborhood: don’t make life harder for the people living next to you. But when one side won’t respect quiet hours or basic courtesy, sometimes the only way to get the message across is to play by their rules.
He asked nicely. She laughed it off. So he fired up the mower before sunrise and gave her a taste of the chaos she’s been letting spill into his mornings.
Because when you live next to someone who refuses to be a good neighbor, sometimes a little revenge feels like the only form of communication that actually works.
This man has a job working late-night shifts, so he sleeps in when the morning rolls around. His next-door neighbor has three young children who are always up early, causing a ruckus in their yard.
The kids get up around 7 a.m. without fail, and they yell and slam their toys around so loudly that he can’t get any shut-eye.
“I know. Kids are kids. But every morning? Weekends too? No. Just…no. I nicely mentioned it to my neighbor a few weeks ago,” he explained.
“She laughed and said, “Oh, they’re early risers! You’ll get used to it.” No apology, no effort to quiet them down.”
That certainly disappointed him that his neighbor was unwilling to tame her children for the sake of his sleep, so he decided to serve her some petty revenge.
He got up at 6 a.m. one morning and began mowing his lawn on the side that is closest to his neighbor’s house.
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From there, he whipped out his leaf blower for good measure and kept the noise coming. Eventually, his neighbor came outside dressed in her pajamas, and she was furious.
“Why are you being so inconsiderate?” She says. I smile and say, “Oh, I’m an early riser! You’ll get used to it,” he added.
“Now she and some other neighbors are saying I should have just “dealt with it like an adult.” But I feel like I just gave them a taste of their own medicine. Those kids need to be considerate too.”
Do you think he was wrong for mowing his lawn super early to get back at his neighbor for having noisy kids?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
