Sans Fig Leaf
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"Hard teacher"
26 October, 2006
Many years ago I lived in a second floor apartment in a small apartment complex. Our door was on the ground floor, and the stairs up to the second floor were inside our apartment. A young woman moved into the unit below us several months after we moved in. When she first arrived, she seemed quite friendly, but that quickly changed, for no apparent reason.
Then one day the landlord called and said he wanted to check something in our kitchen. He set up an appointment for the following weekend. At the appointed time he showed up and poked around under our sink. He asked a lot of questions, but they didn't really seem to have anything to do with the sink. Then he left. I didn't find out what was going on until some weeks later.
The tenant downstairs had been complaining, several times a week, about how unreasonably noisy we were. She claimed we stomped around so loudly she was absolutely certain we were intentionally trying to wake her up, and so on. The landlord's wife got most of these complaints, and was quite surprised, since the tenant who had just moved out had specifically commented on how quiet we were.
So the appointment from the landlord was an experiment. Before the landlord came to our place, his wife went to the lower apartment to discuss the noise problem with the tenant. Then her husband came to our door, walked up the stairs, moved around in our apartment, having a conversation with me, and then walked down the stairs--all while his wife sat talking with the other tenant.
During the conversation, the landlady also made some inquiries about the other tenant's past experience. The other tenant had never before lived in an apartment. Until moving into our complex, she had lived in a large house owned by her parents in a fashionable suburb. Even when she had gone to college, she had attended a school within driving distance of her parents' home. She had never had to live in a dormitory.
Not knowing that the person walking up the stairs and doing most of the walking around the apartment was the landlord, the tenant made several dramatic comments, "Listen to them stomping around up there! How do they make so much noise!?" and so on. She wasn't happy that the landlady didn't agree that the noise was excessive. She was even less happy when she found out who had been making the noise that day.
Before she moved out, we had a few awkward confrontations with her. At one point she told me she didn't know how we had fooled the landlord. I pointed that it was the landlord who had fooled her. Unfortunately she didn't appreciate the humor. Instead she rather angrily explained why the landlord's experiment didn't mean anything: every one of her friends, co-workers, and family members that she had told about our noise-making had agreed with her that it was totally unreasonable to expect someone to put up with that behavior.
I asked if any of those friends had actually heard us moving around our apartment, or only her explanation. This made her even more angry. "Are you calling me a liar?"
I don't know what happened to her. I hope that she eventually found living arrangements more to her liking. I suspect that she didn't for a while, given how adamantly she was convinced that the entire problem was some malicious intent on our part. Not to mention how emphatically she had rejected evidence that contradicted her assumptions, ascribing the landlady's perceptions to some sort of deception on our part.
Nothing in her life up to that point had prepared her for the reality of living in a small apartment building. Lacking a realistic frame of reference, she overreacted to just about everything, describing ordinary walking as stomping, and so on. Of course her friends, hearing her description of the situation, would agree that the noise was excessive--because all they had to go on was her description.
It wasn't that she was dishonest or even delusional. She simply lacked the experience to put the situation into a proper context--or to correctly identify the problem.
The problem wasn't that the people living above her were rude or thoughtless. The problem wasn't even that downstairs apartments can be noisy. The real problem was that she didn't recognize that not all of our expectations are reasonable. Even reasonable expections will be disappointed sometimes. When that happens, it isn't necessarily anyone's fault.
If we insist on trying to cast blame, we may never learn that bad experiences aren't merely to be endured; we're meant to learn from them.
the lesson afterwards.
--Vernon Sanders Law
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