Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (8 page)

• Batshittery. (Is your neighbor seeing voices?)

When I was at the University of Michigan, living in an off-campus apartment in an old house, I was getting my mail, when the wild-eyed creepy guy from an apartment upstairs stuck his face right in mine and hissed, “Redheads are witches and should be burned at the stake!”

Because the guy always seemed unhinged, I thought it was possible he wasn’t just messing with me. I talked to the neighborhood beat cop, and he said, “Unfortunately, we can’t do anything until he lights a fire.” Wonderful. Especially since I translated this as “till he lights
you
on fire.”

This is often the case. Still, if you’re living next to some crazycakes who seems dangerous, you can call your local police station and ask to make an appointment with somebody there so you can find out what the parameters are for dealing with him or her. In Los Angeles, we have “community policing” officers, whose job, in part, involves proactively mediating neighborhood problems, including “quality-of-life issues.” Go to the station accompanied by other neighbors, if possible, so the police don’t wonder whether you’re just fussy, and bring a written record with times, dates, and details of the crazy neighbor’s scariness. Ask the police to keep from letting on to the neighbor that it’s you who’s complained to them.

If police can’t do anything and if you’re renting and the landlord can’t or won’t take action, consider the likelihood that the crazy neighbor will actually follow through on whatever they’re alluding to. Because there’s no reasoning with crazy, moving away from it as fast as you can may ultimately be your least costly option.

• The bar fighter next door

There are born lovers, and there are born fighters—people who see any interaction as a potential opportunity to break a bottle over someone’s head. While these fight-pickers will claim they just want respect, they actually live to be disrespected. Even the tiniest unintended slight by a clerk or a waitress gives them an excuse to launch into revenge mode: Wrong change delivered? What else is there to say but “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”?

Practice identifying the fight-pickers you encounter in business and elsewhere so you can avoid directly engaging with those living around you, and seek alternate, evasive ways to solve whatever problem they’re causing you. (Maybe get a homeowners association board member to propose some new rule to prohibit whatever’s tormenting you.) Remember, no matter how reasonable the request you make of a fight-picker, the slightest challenge to what they perceive as their supremacy and correctness in all matters just provides them ammunition to escalate things between the two of you. If they could, they’d invent a time machine so they could go back and slaughter all your ancestors.

Murder-suicide and other forms of diplomacy: Ways to defuse a problem neighbor.

“Who do you think takes that mattress downstairs? Magical fairies?” Toronto-based blogger Josh Bowman spat that out—not to the neighbors he despises for leaving garbage in the hallways of his apartment building but to readers of the blog
The Good Men Project
. Because many people understand how tricky confronting a neighbor can be, blogs have become huge as a forum for venting about neighbor-on-neighbor rudeness. This is understandable but ultimately pointless.

If you’d like to change more than some website’s traffic count, you need to engage—but judiciously, using strategic thinking and tactics like these below to defuse anger and make your problem neighbors feel understood. “Feel understood”? I know—oh, hurl. Then again, in Sun Tzu’s words from
The Art of War
, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

• Empathy, the great panty-unwadder of humanity

In many conflicts, like when your neighbor leaves his trash cans in front of your property, the injury we feel is largely symbolic. As I’ve written in my advice column, we’re all basically large, easily wounded children. More than anything, we want to be treated like we matter.

I suspected that this was the bottom line in the dispute “Christine in San Juan Capistrano” called in about when I was a guest on Patt Morrison’s show on Southern California public radio on the subject of rude and annoying neighbors.

Christine explained that from time to time, the balls her kids played with in the backyard would fly over the fence into a neighboring backyard. The first time, she and the kids went over and knocked on the neighbors’ door. “The lady seemed to appear very friendly,” Christine said, “and she let us into the backyard to get the balls.” But, the next three or four times, the balls got tossed back over the fence, slashed.

Eek.

Creepy. And really mean.

But, in trying to resolve conflicts—even with neighbors acting horror-movie ugly to your kids—it helps to try to consider where they’re coming from: Do the kids’ balls maybe bounce against the windows and startle the lady? Are the couple in poor health, and do they have a hard time getting into their backyard? It’s possible they’re just awful people, but by trying to call up some empathy for bad neighbors or anyone behaving badly, you’ll deflate some of your anger—improving your ability to approach the offending party in a calm, solution-oriented way.

I explained this to Christine and suggested she write a note along the lines of “Dear Neighbors, I just want to let you know, we’re so sorry about the balls going into your yard. I’m sure this is annoying. And I just want to let you know we’re really trying to not do this. I’m having the kids play at the other end of the yard,”
etc.

In retrospect, I realize that I should have suggested that Christine tuck a $10 Starbucks gift card in with her apology. Beyond gift giving’s power to ramp up goodwill, research suggests that an apology is more likely to dissolve anger and lead to forgiveness if it’s accompanied by some sort of payout or gift. (More on this in “The Apology” chapter.)

Yes, I’m actually suggesting she not only write this kowtowing letter but actually spend money on these horrible people, and yes, this probably seems like suck-up overkill on top of suck-up overkill. But, when you’ve got a bunch of children separated by only some fence slats from some knife-wielding, toy-slashing neighbors, sucking up seems just the thing to do.

• Talk is expensive: Why a handwritten note is often the best approach to problem neighbors.

There’s that silly saying, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Maybe it is—if you can write like Thomas Jefferson. Otherwise, the next time somebody challenges you to a knife fight, see how far that Pilot gel-point gets you. But when you’re trying to resolve a beef with a neighbor—one you’re reasonably sure will come to the door armed with nothing more dangerous than a spatula—the pen tends to be far more effective than the face-to-face conversation.

Again, we humans aren’t the most mature creatures. We have the ability to reason, but we’re apparently terrified of wearing it out. We also have these fantastic evolved adaptations, like our fight-or-flight response, which makes us perfectly prepared to have some chance of escaping from a bear and rather imperfectly prepared to respond in a reasonable manner to a neighbor telling us our leaky hose is flooding his posies. Even the most valid criticism gets us defensive before we can give a moment’s thought to whether the person criticizing us might be, you know, an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bit … um … right?

A handwritten note about an issue (like the one I gave to my hootenanny-having neighbor) puts time and distance between you, your criticism, and the criticized person, giving them the chance to cool down and respond in a more reasoned way. In fact, if you’ve written a diplomatic, empathetic message like the one I suggested to Christine, a neighbor might even concede that you have a point. Or concede that it might behoove them to act like you have a point.

And yes, you actually do need to hand-write your message, not put it in an e-mail. E-mail makes it just too easy for you to dash off something rash and for your neighbor to dash back an irate reply, and before you know it, missile silos will be sprouting in two suburban backyards.

• In neighborhood disagreements, honesty is the worst policy.

In my advice to Christine, I warned her to make no mention of the neighbors’ ball-slashing, explaining, “It is a normal part of life for kids’ balls to go over fences, and these people are a little psycho.” The truth is, calling somebody on their bad behavior in anything but a roundabout way tends to provoke denials, which are basically angry attempts to save face. A less provoking approach is presenting an issue by appearing to give your neighbor the benefit of the doubt—even when you both know they don’t deserve it for a minute.

Say, for example, that the lady next door has been letting her unleashed dog run over and poop on your lawn. And say you know that this is not a secret to her (because you’ve seen her on her porch in her bathrobe with a cup of coffee, shouting, “Muffin, go shit in the neighbors’ bushes!”). You still need to pretend otherwise and write her a note that leads off with “You probably don’t know this…”

This approach allows the two of you to maintain a polite fiction in which you and she both pretend that you don’t find her about as genteel as an ass boil. This, in turn, keeps the conflict from escalating, giving you some chance of having your lawn just be your lawn instead of her dog’s giant free-range litter box.

• When you’re the problem neighbor: Listen to criticism instead of clobbering the critic.

Selfish, self-absorbed little beasties that we are, listening does not come naturally to us. And because we tend to fly off the handle when criticized, listening when somebody’s putting us in the hot seat takes preplanning: being mindful of our bratty tendencies and resolving that we’ll take some deep breaths and hear a critic out.

Considering things from a complaining neighbor’s point of view may sometimes require a field trip, as I advised “Michael from Brea,” who also called in to Patt Morrison’s show. His neighbors kept complaining about the thumping bass line from the music he listens to on weekends, he explained. I told him that he should say something like “Listen, I want to solve this; I don’t want to torture you” and then ask to go over to their place when his music’s playing so he can hear what they hear. (Just letting them know that you’re willing to investigate means a lot.)

If he
is
rocking not only his world but theirs, he needs to correct that: listen through headphones, figure out what the volume has to be to stop the thumping, or look into ways to sound-mask his place. Whatever you do in and around your home or apartment—smoking, playing music, cooking stinky food, racing Shetland ponies across your hardwood floors—being a considerate neighbor means not letting it leak into the lives of those living around you.

Revenge is the best revenge: If you can’t stop the rude, maybe you can globally shame them.

The rudesters in your neighborhood whose craptastic behavior you will have the least control over are visiting strangers and neighbors who don’t live near you. Total strangers know they’re unlikely to see you again, and a rude neighbor whose car, house, and peace and quiet are five blocks away gets that it’ll be hard for you to do much more than shoot them the occasional hate glare. (“Ooh, that smarts!”)

These people’s obnoxious behaviors may call for multimedia measures. An increasingly common one is what I call “PooTube”—shooting and uploading video to YouTube of one of those dog walkers who always manage to spot something absolutely riveting going on up in a tree as their mutt’s taking a crap on the sidewalk or somebody’s lawn.

You can shoot the video on your smartphone (taking care to avoid being caught in the act) or use security cam video from your house or a neighbor’s. To improve its chances of going viral (as a number of these videos have), in addition to posting it on social media, e-mail the link to local bloggers and traditional media. Pull screenshots from the video and post fliers around your block—“Hey, Dog Poo Leaver…”—with a photo of the perp with the dog doing its business and maybe a close-up of the poo left behind.
⁷

One rude neighborhood dog walker did pick up after his dog but hung on to the poobag, waiting to dump it until he reached the manicured shrubbery of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, resident Steve Miller. After Miller found a whole pile of poobags in his bushes, he bought a video surveillance system and caught his neighbor in the act—day after day for a month—once even capturing the guy doing an artful swinging windup and toss of the day’s poobag.