I’m outside my apartment building, kneeling on the sidewalk. I have a bag of candy in front of me, and I’m wielding a hammer. A neighbor comes up the walk, sees me and pauses. I whack the candy with the hammer, shattering it.

Me: “Hey, [Neighbor].” *Whack*

Neighbor: “Hey, [My Name]. Whatcha doing?”

Me: *Whack* “Baking a cake. This part is loud, so I just do it outside.”

Neighbor: “Your cake baking involves a hammer?”

Me: “And two days for everything to finish.” *Whack*

Neighbor: “Heh, sounds fun. Save me a piece?”

Me: “Sure!” *Whack*

Two days later, I knocked on his door with a big slab of my cake for him and his fiancée to share, complete with the shattered candy on top. His fiancée later came up and asked me how to make the cake for his birthday because they’d both loved it so much.

I saw her outside a few days later, a bag of candy at her side, and a hammer in hand. If someone asked what she was doing, she’d laugh and tell them she was baking.

A homeowner in my area wanted to open a seasonal “wedding tent” venue on their acreage. They would only operate on summer weekends, and they would limit the number of guests (“only 100”), but they hoped to open a second tent on their property if the first one went well.

BUT… it was on a dead-end road, with only eight to ten other houses on it. The volume of traffic on summer weekends would go up astronomically.

Also, the dead-end road emptied onto a road that was a different dead-end with a golf course at the end (a T intersection), which was already generating a lot of traffic in the summer months.

Finally, the most-used road from the golf course and the proposed wedding venue also has a death toll — ironically, because it is long, straight, and not that busy after dark.

Long story short, neighbours banded together to oppose this, raised money, and hired a lawyer, and the county council denied the application.

My neighbor and I aren’t friends, but we wave when passing in vehicles or walking. About a year ago, my wife ordered something for one of our kids, and it was delivered to the wrong house. Our house numbers and mailboxes are very similar and easy to confuse, like 668 and 688.

After a couple of days, I called, and the company sent me the photo taken of the box on my neighbor’s porch, so I walked over to retrieve it.

Neighbor: “I took it back to the shipping hub. I was heading in that direction anyway.”

When I asked why he didn’t either text me or just walk next door, he didn’t have an answer. Okay, very frustrating. It took five more days for our item to arrive.

On Friday afternoon, I was working from home, and I saw a box delivered to my porch. I went out to get it and saw that it was a package for [Neighbor]. On the small return portion of the shipping label, it said, “[Electronics Company], one-day rush,” and the shipping sticker said something like $31.39.

My neighbor had ordered a laptop by the weight of it and had rushed it over. I picked it up and went straight to the shipping center — after all my errands were done so I was walking in at 4:50 pm. I didn’t want to risk them trying to redeliver it before the end of the day.

The next day, [Neighbor] came over with the photo of the box on my front deck.

Neighbor: “Do you have my package? It’s important.”

Me: “I took it back to be redelivered.”

Neighbor: *Almost enraged* “Why?!”

Me: “That’s the exact same question I asked you when you did it before. Just thought this was what you wanted going forward.”

He was walking down my driveway, shaking his head extra dramatically, but what’s good for one should be good for all, no?

CONTENT WARNING: Animal Neglect (Happy Ending)

I’m the author who submitted this story.

We had a family dinner for my dad’s birthday, and he told me another one from when he was stationed in Maryland in the 1970s before he met my mother.

Dad liked to live off base, and one of his civilian neighbors had a German shepherd. This jerk would keep the dog leashed outside in rain, sun, and snow. He never brought it in or gave it any kind of shelter. Since it was the 1970s, there weren’t any laws to smack him with.

When the jerk was absent or asleep, Dad took to sneaking over and letting the dog loose so it could seek shelter for itself. Danger from the elements or danger from running loose — the poor dog was in a catch-22

Of course, the jerk would go find the dog, or it would come back on its own.

Then, one day, it didn’t come back. And didn’t come back. And the jerk couldn’t find it.

About a week after the jerk gave up, Dad had to go to the motor pool on the Army base to sign out a truck. There was the dog, happily snoozing away by the heater.

Dad never told the neighbor what happened to the dog.

Related:
Some People Shouldn’t Own Dogs, Period
Pretty Sure Show Dogs Are Also Judged On Behavior

A few years ago, I was building a new fence for a friend of mine. First, I had to remove the old sections that were falling apart, of course, and when I got to the intersection of his back fence, his side fence, and the next-door neighbor’s back fence, I carefully separated the neighbor’s fence from his and proceeded to carry on removing the side sections that went between their two properties.

My friend had told me that the side section was 100% on his property and that the previous owner (over thirty years ago) had deliberately given the next-door neighbor’s property an extra foot or so to ensure that he was building on his own property (without calling for and paying for a survey).

The neighbor came running outside screaming at me.

Neighbor: “You can’t remove that fence! That’s our property! Just what do you think you’re doing?!”

Me: *Very calmly* “[Friend] told you well in advance that he was going to replace this fence and that he was just going to build it in the same place as the old one. He asked you if you were willing to split the costs, and you declined.”

No biggie.

[Neighbor] started screaming at me again.

Neighbor: “You have no right to do that! [Friend] didn’t give us proper notice! I didn’t realize that there wouldn’t be anything between our two properties to contain my dog!”

By then, I was about ready to lose my s***, so I knocked on [Friend]’s back door to let him know what was going on.

Me: “You need to talk to [Neighbor]. I’m leaving because I don’t want to do or say anything I’ll regret, and I don’t want to cause you problems with the neighbors.”

The entire project got put on hold, pending a property survey that was going to cost $650, and that they demanded my friend pay half of, despite him telling them that the fence was definitely on his property, and nothing was going to change with the new fence, and that he was fine with them continuing to have a foot or so of his property, so that he didn’t have to rock the boat.

Fast forward to the following Monday when the surveyor came out. It turned out that the old side fence was not “a little” on [Friend]’s property, but ALMOST TEN FEET onto his property. The neighbors had built up raised flower beds and done a nice brick retaining wall right up along the fence line, which they had spent a lot of money just in materials for, never mind the time they put in constructing it.

Needless to say, [Friend] came away with the biggest s***-eating grin. For the mere price of $325, he was entitled to expand his yard of more than thirty years by about 800 square feet. And [Neighbor] and her husband (who happened to be the polar opposite of his wife in personality and was super nice) spent the next week moving their garden, retaining wall, and all of the dirt that was on [Friend]’s property so that I could build the fence on his side of the ACTUAL property line.

The neighbors then hired the cheapest contractors they could find to slap up a fence on their side of the property line. They spent almost as much as my friend did on their new fence. (I gave my friend the friends and family discount.)

Three years later, the last twenty feet or so of their fence is on the ground already because it was such a s***ty job that it fell over in a moderate wind storm this past spring. [Friend]’s fence is still standing, rock solid, and his dogs are definitely making good use of the extra 800 square feet.