The Nice Thing About Living in an Apartment...

The nice thing about living in an apartment is that you have lots of neighbors, so there are lots of opportunities to learn new things about someone.

For example, tonight we learned that our neighbors directly below us are very passive-aggressive and have some kind of moral aversion to bookshelves.

See, apparently for some reason our neighbors downstairs feel that putting together a bookshelf (which unfortunately requires hammering) is a thing that should not be done, at least not at 6pm on a Sunday. While we were putting ours together, they heard us hammering for about two minutes and then pounded on their ceiling so hard that our whole living room shook for a solid twenty seconds.

Do they have a sleeping baby? Do they work overnights and need to be asleep at that hour? Does someone in the household have a deadly allergy to the sound of hammering? We'll never know, because I went downstairs and knocked on their door to talk to them and they wouldn't answer. Because actually discussing things like adults is too hard for...presumably, adults, considering they have their own apartment and all.

Now it's taking us twice as long to build the damn shelf as it should because we're trying so hard to not hammer loudly or for too long at a time or anything because we don't need our neighbors up our ass or filing noise complaints against us. So here we are at ten past seven, almost an hour past when we started, and we have a not-quite-completed bookshelf lying down in the middle of our living room because all that's left to do is...hammering.