Shortly after moving into my new apartment complex, I was quickly welcomed to the community with a series of calls from my concierge. “Are you home?” Yes. “Are you bouncing a basketball?” No. (Random)”Have you bounced a ball of any kind this evening?” No. “What are you doing right now?” (Intrusive) Uh, making my bed. “You’re making too much noise, get a rug for underneath your bed.” Okay.
Looking back, there was no way that making my bed was responsible for sounds similar to that of bouncing a basketball. But I was so timid, I had no idea how to tell her how absurd that was to suggest. She would call when I wasn’t home. She would call when I was. But never when I was bouncing a basketball. To this day, she probably still thinks it’s me.
Either way, eventually the calls became less frequent until finally they stopped. The noises in my apartment complex, however, have been going stronger than an Energizer bunny. What lives are people living to cause this persistent stream of noise?
Right now I’m experiencing a periodic banging noise. And the only coping mechanism I’ve found to be successful in helping me endure this unbearably long marathon of pounding noises has been listing all the scenarios that could be causing such a ruckus to occur:
- Bouncing a basketball
- Hammering
- Sex (which would transform “banging noise” into a pun)
- Excessively tenderizing a piece of meat with a meat mallet
- Dobby the House Elf punishing himself for telling Harry Potter secrets
- Aggressively flattening a piece of clay on a surface
- A man stuck under a very long and wide table trying to get out from underneath
- Persistent knocking on the door from denial that no one is home
- Engaging in a prolonged fight over the bathroom
- Noah 2.0 building an arc
- A resident hulahooping in their walk-in closet, not phased by hitting the walls
- A concussed head banger unaware how close to the wall they are
- Gnomes in a cabinet excitedly jumping up and down in tall hats
- Practicing for a (professional or amateur) pogo competition
- A very tall man fist-pumping
- A tap dancer tapdancing in scuba diving fins
- Learning how to kickbox using the wall – cross, cross, uppercut, roundhouse kick
- Frustratedly trying to excavate a genie from a lamp
- Assembling a complex, thirty-piece IKEA table
- A hard-of-hearing elderly man in a rocking chair too close to the wall
- A stomp-only step class
Now cut it out so I can sleep.
/ˈskribəl/ 