Little Miss Noisypants

Back at the end of March, I got a new neighbor. I like to call her Little Miss Noisypants. That’s just behind her back, of course.

Before Miss Noisypants moved in, I had a family living in the appartment above me. A young man and his wife, and two fairly noisy little boys, both under the age of four. Sometimes, the little boys ran up and down the hall, and because we have wooden floors in this building, I could hear them. I could also hear them if they fell over and hurt themselves and when they woke up crying at night, and I could hear their parents going for showers in the morning. It was normal noise.

Little Miss Noisypants makes more noise than this entire family put together, and I don’t think she’s running up and down the hall.

Just before she moved in, Miss Noisypants came to check that everything was ready – notices up in our little street warning that the removal vans would be coming, etc. and to pick up the keys. I met her on the stairs and she introduced herself and shook my hand and was so überfriendly that I thought my lucky day had come! Within about an hour, I had already seen my future with her in it, to wit, girly evenings out at the café round the corner, late night talks on the balcony, New Years’ Eve together watching the fireworks.

Miss Noisypants explained that she was moving down here from the north of Germany, as she had a new job in the city, and that her husband would only be joining her on weekends until he also found a job here. “I’ll miss him”, she told me. “But then I’ll enjoy being with him so much more when he comes on the weekends”.

Shortly after this, it was my birthday. I had invited friends for the evening, but I didn’t know if it might get loud (piano-playing, etc.) so in the early afternoon I went up to The Noisypants’ appartment to apologize in advance (both Noisypantses were in).

I told them I wasn’t sure if it might get a tad louder later, but as a kind of compensation I would like to invite them for a coffee and cake that afternoon, as it was my birthday after all.

Miss Noisypants said they really didn’t have time. And that was the end of that.

In the meantime, I can tell you that Miss Noisypants gets up around 6:45 a.m. every morning. She bangs around a lot, opening drawers and cupboards. She does seem to wear high-heels all the time, even on these beautiful wooden floors. She leaves the house at 8 a.m. She returns around 6 p.m. She goes to bed between 11 and 12 in the evening. On weekends, she gets up a little later, and often goes out on a Saturday, usually returning around 1 a.m. (when, it seems, she sometimes likes to start moving the furniture around).

She seems to walk several kilometers every day (usually evenings) in the appartment. It doesn’t matter how loud I turn up my TV, I can still hear Elephant Woman, sorry Miss Noisypants striding around upstairs. And it’s always very fast. I would say she walks at a rate of about 5.5 km/per hour. I don’t know what she’s doing, walking very fast from room to room with almost no letup, for several hours on end. It seems to be bordering on some kind of a disorder that is a simple inability to keep still!

The Noisypantses also have a large car, and guess what, they got the parking space next to mine in the underground parking garage. It’s more like we both have to share a non-demarcated space. Needless to say, they take up more of this space than is comfortable, which means that I have a problem at least twice a day (trying to get out of my space and trying to get back in). The worst part is, Miss Noisypants doesn’t seem to have a driver’s license. I’m guessing she goes to work on the tram. The car is used very occasionally (sometimes when Mr. Noisypants arrives for the weekend), and then it is parked (quite badly) and you have to live with that until the next time the car is moved.

Anti-Pants feeling reached new heights in my appartment last week. The Pantses have a lot of empty boxes. Instead of taking these to the dump (how could they, unless they used the car) they stack them around their car in our non-demarcated parking space. This means of course that some of these boxes have been encroaching on my space and on more than one occasion I have found boxes in the middle of my parking space, which means that I crash into them when I drive in, as I can’t see them from the angle I approach. On Friday, Miss Noisypants once again placed boxes on my space so that I, approaching around the corner, crashed straight into them when I tried to park.

Miss Noisypants claimed she’d only placed them there for 2 or 3 minutes and was going to remove them. She did not apologize either! It’s beyond me why she would want to place them there at all, but there you go.