Most of these people are using gas powered lawn equipment — weed whackers, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and anything else you can think of and beyond. (For trimming is one measly cedar hedge, one guy uses a chain saw that looks like it's leftover from clearing his grandfather’s farmland. He then hauls out an equally archaic wood chipper for the few scraggily branches he has mutilated. Both produce noise that could easily be mistaken for an ancient Harley-Davidson in desperate need of a tune up.
There are those who make it their life's work finding things to do with the power tools that they have been given as gifts over the years. They've never made an effort to learn how to use this equipment. This means you not only have to listen to them being used, but abused on top of that, and for far longer then the "jobs" being done merit. One particular idiot took three months to rebuild a small atrium off his front door. Most of his work seemed to involve hitting things loudly for extended periods of time with a hammer for no apparent reason except that he couldn't hammer a nail in to save his life.
As if the noise weren't bad enough, the attitude that goes with it is amazing. How can they not realize their constant barrage of sound is disturbing everyone? But if you should happen to point out the fact that the windows of your apartment are rattling because of their lawn mower, they either don't care or take a sort of perverse pride in it.
It might explain why nobody in my neighbourhood is able to talk at a level of anything less then a shout. One family group gathers on their fire escape and shouts the intimate details of their lives at each other. But it doesn't explain why people feel the need to hold conversations by shouting at each other from top floor balconies to the sidewalk across the road.
Don’t they know or care that everybody within a two-block radius can hear every word they are saying? Don't any of these people stop to consider that no one else wants to hear the sound of their voice echoing through their apartment? These same people complain about other people's noise but don't seem to notice they are contributing to the overall cacophony that besets us on a daily basis.
Article comments
1 - robertmacevain
DOOMSDAY PENDING?
Doomsday Pending? or Doomsday Thwarted?
In the year 1905, Nobel physicist, Albert Einstein, published his E=mc² equation, which opened the door to The World Of The PROTON GENIE.
Einstein's work provides the basis for extracting and fusing PROTONS from ordinary pure water, and make everybody on Earth so idly rich and content from the benefits of this clean, virtually-free and inexhaustible energy supply that nobody should ever again have to worry about pollution, war or poverty, and Mother Nature can once again reign as The Supreme Mistress of any and all Climate Change.
The Doomsday Clock reads: 7 minutes until Doomsday, and counting!
Is it too late? Or, will some ordinary, individual tinkerer (maybe just an average high school student) rise to the occasion and demonstrate the physical expression of Einstein's equation so that the entire World Population can move forward into a future of peace, contentment and prosperity?
web site: blogspot
2 - Deano
Well, I could (courteously of course) point out that the mere fact that selfish behaviors are an intrinstic part of the human experience, as so, somewhere along the line, must have been an evolutionary trait that enhanced survival.
That ability to distance yourself from others and consider only your own worth, to take the last cookie on the plate, ill-mannered though it be at times, is a survival trait.
Someone once noted that in nature, the only unnatural act is one that you cannot do. Selfish behaviors, though at times socially disruptive, have their place right alongside altruism and other "positive" social/emotional behaviors...but I do sympathize regarding the construction and / or leaf-blowing/hedge-triming.
Think of it as evolution in action.
3 - Nancy
Things like what go on in your neighborhood get easier to take as one gets older and deafer, in my actual experience. Be that as it may, you sound like you just have the misfortune to live in a neighborhood of Yahoos. I've noticed neighborhoods are like that: some neighborhoods tend to attract quiet, peacable types; some attract the birders; some the young breeders; and others get the rednecks or yahoos.
I was lucky. My own area is predominantly older, more settled types. It may very well be noisy from time to time (we have a county ballfield in the park behind my condo), but the increasing deafness that has come with age reduces it to a nice distant sound of people at play, interspersed with strident shrills of katydids nearer to hand. Ah, the country. Or suburbia. Whatever.
You either need to get deafer, or you need to move someplace away from the donut shop.