He never parked in front of my house again. The aftermath of the situation was even better than the prank itself. A few of our neighbors had watched the entire saga unfold over those three weeks and they had seen the police show up, they had seen the code enforcement officers, and they had realized that the HOA president was not invincible. People started looking into the fines that he had been issuing them and it turned out I was not the only person he had been unfairly targeting. Several neighbors banded together and attended the next board meeting and they presented evidence of his arbitrary fines and his misuse of the towing company. The backlash was immense. A special election was called shortly after and he was voted out of his presidency by an overwhelming majority.
The next story is titled Revenge on the Neighbor from Hell. My husband and I are buying our first home together. When we moved in, we quickly found out that our neighbor wanted to respect that he wouldn’t give anyone else. He was pretending to own the lot between our houses and he had the nerve to confront our contractor about leaving his truck on it. Mind you, he had four junk cars parked on the lot already and he was also letting his dog poop on the lot and never cleaned up the poop. Not to mention he never put a leash on the dog and just let him out freely without even looking to see if we were outside. To add insult to injury, he started playing his music at any time of the day and night as loudly as possible. One day we got a notification from the city that we could buy the lot. Well, guess what we did. We purchased the lot. And then when he refused to stop letting his dog out or to remove his last junk heap, I started calling the police and animal control. I called them four times in one week. I even had his junk heap towed by the police and he got so mad that he tried to confront me in front of the cops. He was like, “What is it now? First you don’t want my dog in your lot and then you call about my music. Why are they here now?” Well, now he keeps his dog in his yard and stops his loud music before 10:00 p.m.
The next one is titled A Good Fence from a Bad Neighbor. This isn’t my story but a friend of mine told me this one recently. She lives on a decently large lot that’s been in her family for a couple generations. It used to be outskirts farmland but development has been encroaching for a while. Her house was built by her grandparents and she bought it when they both passed. It’s kind of old, it needs a ton of work and she’s doing it little at a time as she can afford it. A while ago, the lot next to her was bought by a developer and they cleared the land to dirt and some apartments or something are going up soon. There was a pretty old chain link fence separating the very long property line and the new land owner decided to replace it with a block wall. He knocked on her door one day to ask if she wanted to go halfsies and she said she would like to but apologized and said she doesn’t have that kind of money. He got pissed that she couldn’t share the cost and said he was going to tell the contractor not to finish their side of the wall she could see so the mortar would be all glooping out and look terrible. Fast forward to the day the building crew shows up to construct a fence. They knock on her door. The cleared land now has zero water access and they cannot complete the job without it. She confirmed it with the foreman that the land owner had told them not to finish one side of the fence. The foreman agreed that if they could use her garden hose for the day, they would not make her side look crappy. Not only that, they also paid her $100 cash for the water, which they no doubt then billed to their client as part of the job.
The next one is titled Bad Neighbors. Years ago, I lived in a duplex townhouse on the bottom floor by myself. The upper apartment was two floors and we all shared the backyard, although I did all the yard upkeep. There were several 20-something guys living upstairs. They were loud and crazy, kind of like a frat house, but they were not students. They were just young and inconsiderate. Either way, I was away one weekend and when I came back, I found a used condom on my lounge chair on my personal deck. I was pretty ticked off. This was my personal property, which they had no right to use, let alone leave a disgusting used thing upon. I put on disposable gloves, grabbed their used device, a hammer, and a nail, and I nailed it to their front door. I figured they should have it back. They were still inconsiderate and amazingly loud at times afterwards, but that was the last time they sleazily left their nasty leftovers on my stuff.