'I was losing sleep and my mind': Noisy neighbors catch payback in the form of malicious compliance after years of gaslighting the resident next door

Jesse Kessenheimer • Writer and Editor

Apr 15, 2023 6:00 PM EDT

Dealing with noisy neighbors is the worst. There's always a risk of starting a superiority contest on who is more passive aggressive, who's louder, and who's more willing to lose sleep over a petty neighborhood battle. One man learned his lesson the hard way– After years of harassing his neighbor next door with booming music and surround sound movies at all hours of the night, she got payback.

u/living_the_dweam, a woman living in a duplex that shared a wall with the loud man, had endured several months of his booming music, which was competing with street noise, fans, and a lack of human decency. He would play tunes at all hours and refused to shut his doors or windows, meaning the sound poured directly into her home, disturbing her precious sleep.

Finally, after failed passive aggressive techniques and borderline begging, she brought him over so that they could test the equivalent noise coming from her apartment into his. In an attempt to keep his lifestyle unchanged, the loud man claimed that when her sound system was at its loudest, he heard nothing in his apartment.

But he didn't realize this woman was playing chess, not checkers.

After a few more agonizing months, she started to notice baby stuff arriving at his doorstep. Low and behold, 9 months later, he and his girlfriend welcomed a brand new baby into their home. The baby cried constantly, but the woman had the perfect way to drown out the noise– with her sound system.

She pulled and uno-reverse on her neighbor, playing her music as loud as she wanted. He claimed before that he couldn't hear it, but now was suddenly begging her to turn it down because he hadn't slept in months because of the baby. Now that it was his sleep in jeopardy, he seemed to have a change of heart when it came to acting neighborly and respectful about your noisiness.

The woman claims she'll adjust her sound settings soon… just as soon as her neighbor has learned his lesson with a taste of his own medicine.