I have lived in Morgantown, WV for 5 years now, and I have never, ever gotten yelled at. I have never been arrested, been disorderly, been scolded by teachers, RAs, or any other sort of authority figure. In a nutshell, I’ve never gotten into any possible form of trouble at all.
I guess this changed tonight. At approximately 9:50 PM this Sunday night I got “in trouble.”
We have a large porch in the front of our house, complete with a table and a couple of chairs. Lately I have taken advantage of the gorgeous weather and have been spending a lot of time there. I’ll sit on my chairs and talk on my phone while smoking cigarettes and enjoying the weather. Apparently such actions have been exasperating one of my neighbors.
Tonight, I was sitting on my front porch talking on the phone with my girlfriend Alexa. She is my best friend from home, and during this particular conversation I will admit I was laughing loudly pretty much the entire conversation.
During the phone call at one point (9:50 PM) I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I noticed a middle aged woman marching towards me from the apartments across the street. She was clearly on a mission, and headed directly towards me, so I hung up the phone immediately in case I would need to call the police.
The second she got to the bottom of the steps of my front porch she started yelling at me. She informed me that it was “hot outside” so she needed to open up her windows (as she was screaming this at me I glanced at the mandatory, built in air-conditioning unit each of those apartments has) and that my voice was echoing and carrying around the neighborhood so she couldn’t sleep. She continued to yell about the fact that she had to wake up early in the morning and emphatically stated that this wasn’t the first time I had woken her up.
So how did I handle it? I completely froze up and profusely apologized to this woman. Again and again I stuttered the words, “I’m sorry,” humiliated.
After she finished yelling at me, ignoring whatever I had to say, the woman spun on her heels and stalked off back to her apartment.
First of all, this mortified me. I am an extremely unconfrontational person, and the fact that I was keeping a neighbor of mine up or even causing any discomfort to her was extremely bothersome to me. The second she started yelling at me my face turned bright red, and it burned red for another half an hour.
Besides being embarrassed, the thing that bothered me the most was the way and tone that she approached me with.
After these incidences where I woke her up occurred, any mature adult would have come over during the day (or night!), knocked on my door, and had an adult conversation with me about it. Instead she ran over, screamed at me, then stalked off leaving me speechless.
I live in a college town. This is Morgantown, WV. I am constantly woken up by drunks running up and down my street at ALL HOURS of the night. I understand the frustration of being woken up by somebody– really I do.
Jake and I live in this house with our two dogs. We have never held a party, and we have never had more than one guest in our house at a time. We are not disrespectful neighbors in any sense of the term.
As her neighbor, I am her peer. I am not her child, her student, her renter, or in any other position that would position me lower than her. All I would ask is to be treated as such.
I am exceedingly tired of people talking down to me just because they peg me to be a typical college student, or simply just any college student at all.
If somebody has a problem with me or my actions, all they would have to do is approach me about it in a mature way. Maybe they would discover I am much more than the stereotypical drunk, obnoxious, loud college student.
I’m sure many of you feel the same way.
Tags: adult, angry neighbors, annoyed, college student, in trouble, loud, mature, obnoxious, yelled at
