An annoying neighbour...

Today is one of those days when I am a little tired, because of a long work week. These things happen. What made this week a little more tiring were two extra things: The first week back from our trip to New Zealand. Y'know, finding your way around the work place again mixed with a jetlag. The second, the one that I can seriously live without, is one of our neighbours. We live in a multi-storey building and one of them, an early-retired, overtly homosexual (there is no doubt) man, has made it his duty to be the guardian of the building.

At one point, he realised that our garage door (which is in the basement, so only accessible to other inhabitants of the house) is left open. We leave it open because my wife has trouble opening it and the air circulation is bad and we may get mould in the back of our garage. Both things are easily avoided by leaving the door open. There is nothing of value in the garage except our car, but if someone wants to steal a car, why not try their hand at a newer model that is outside on the street.

He has now made it his duty to close the door for us. At one point, I confronted him about it and one of those tiresome conversations ensued with someone who constantly tries to catch you out to show that he is smarter. Now my Dutch is ok, but not superfluent, so I struggle along patiently trying to explain to him why we leave it open and he kept on jumping in with tedious and unnecessary corrections. Here is an excerpt of this conversation I still remember very vividly.

Me: "Well, it is my garage, so..."

Him: "Not yours, your landlord's."

Me: "It's certainly not yours, so stop it."

Him: "Yes, but..." etc. etc.

After this conversation, he stopped doing it thankfully. I know from other neighbours in the house, that he is fuming over the lip I had telling him what to do. I thought I was polite and just told him to mind his own business.

The non-sensical thing is that he is super busy making sure that other people follow all the house rules and many rules of his own choosing (closed garage door is not a house rule, I checked with the building manager), but he himself does not take it overly literal with him following rules. The guy is obviously bored and needs something to do. I just wish he would take up pottery, pilates or yoga instead of involving me in his free-time activities.

Then about one month later, we received an anonymous complaint handed down by the building manager that our garage apparently poses a fire hazard due to the card board boxes that stick out into the open space "especially because the garage door is always left open." Now, I never got proof, but we can all guess who that one was from. After conferring with our landlord, we ignored it and carried on.

Then we went to New Zealand and locked our garage door for the month we were away like we locked everything before we left. Then we arrive back, relaxed not even thinking about that man anymore, opening our garage door and now he promptly re-started doing this charade and closes our door every day.

I am really tired of this stupidity, so my brother gave me the idea to lock our garage door opened using a bicycle lock. Good idea, I thought and from now on our garage door is open and locked if that makes sense. €4,90 well spent. Let's see what he does next. The only thing left to him, would be to do damage to the lock or to items in the garage which is, of course, illegal. I wonder if he goes that far...

Anyways, needed to write this down to make sure this is really as silly as it feels to me... and yes, it is silly. Has anyone of you ever had such a charming neighbour?