Our neighbour runs a nightclub. He gets home late, pissed and coked up. He invites friends around too. Fair enough so far. Our flat shares a flight of stairs with him and two other flats. Each flat has an intercom which connects to a shared button panel at the door. The buttons are unlabeled and the mechanism for labeling them is protected by a metal plate puttied to the wall and screwed in with weird screws. So when the pissed friends turn up at five in in the morning, they buzz us instead of our neighbour. They wake us up, a lot. Louise doesn’t get proper sleep when that happens. It’s been getting worse and worse, to the point where they’ve disturbed us and the residents of the other two flats pretty much every night this week. We’re not happy at all.

When we got buzzed by the guy’s very pissed and abusive girlfriend this morning, Louise hit the roof. We ignored it the first three times but when this woman started holding down the button Louise went out to sort it out. I got a bit worried because she was out arguing with this guy and his mates after a while and I felt sheepish staying in bed so I went and joined in. We had an argument which must have lasted almost half an hour. The guy fed us all kinds of bullshit about why it was happening and what he would do about it and starting banging on about how important his Dad was. Typical cokehead behaviour. After a while we had to give up as we had made our point in the short term and weren’t going to get any further. One of his mates was more understanding and was taking our side. It all gets so away from the point when you’re dealing with somebody who just doesn’t listen and who spouts out bullshit in response. In the end I was saying to him, look, we just don’t want to get buzzed at night, OK, is that too much to ask? God only knows how much went in and didn’t go straight out the other ear.

Today Louise went at the intercom with pliers and screwdrivers and a stanley knife and managed to label the buttons with large bold labels. You’d have to be pretty ridiculously pissed or stupid or both to get the wrong button now. We even put names on for us and him, to make it even more obvious. It remains to see just how retarded and useless the guy’s mates are. For now at least the silence is holding, but we’ll see what happens this week.

On the way back from the cinema tonight the guy and his understanding friend were leaving the square. I gave them a thumbs up and a grin. To be honest, the guy’s such a muppet that I just feel superior to him now. I have, as they say, got his number. He’s a kid, he’s just too dumb to really get pissed off, so he was friendly, in this big dumb everybody wants to be my mate cor yeah no worries geezer way. We chatted briefly and with smiles and he gave some more empty but vaguely positive promises. I told them both to take it easy, as I do, and off they went. It was a good thing. We don’t want to be enemies with this guy. We don’t want a whole feud going on, we just want a bit of peace and quiet at night.

It’s still to soon to relax yet. As I type this I keep expecting the buzzer to go and for it all to kick off again. It’s a horrible feeling, I just can’t relax quietly with myself, something I can usually do quite easily. The whole thing’s been very stressful. It’s making it hard to work as well. I just hope that it never happens again, I don’t want the annoyance, but more I really just don’t want the anger and the confrontation.

He’s pissed off the other people on the staircase as well, and we’ve all been talking. If it goes on then we’re going to have a case to take to the resident’s committee, the management company and even the police if it goes that far. I really hope that the problem is over though. I just want to chill out properly.