The Most Ridiculous Feuds Between Neighbors Ever
by Pauli Poisuo
Neighbors are the worst, with their dogs and garbage and death metal blasting through that cardboard-thin wall on the other side of your apartment. But count your blessings for those mundane issues – because things can go so much more terribly. And in a hurry.
A Dispute About A Koi Pond Turns Into A Middle Finger Statue
Let’s say you want a koi pond, because of reasons, we guess. It’s not exactly the easiest of undertakings. You have to be able to afford it, determine the dimensions, hire some people to dig it out, get the water’s degree of acidity just right, plus find out just what the hell sort of fish a koi is.
Tina Rose of Chino Hills, L.A. went through all that. Finally, it was in order, and she was ready for her new life as “Tina Rose, but now with a koi pond.” But then her doorbell rang, and it was her neighbor with a minor complaint: Part of Rose’s pond was on their property.
Pixabay
We’re not sure why that’s a problem, but …
At this point, things could have gone a number of ways. All of the reasonable potential scenarios involved Rose apologizing for not realizing that the pond infringed on her neighbor’s yard, and them both coming up with a reasonable solution as to what to do next. Unfortunately, nothing like that took place. Instead, the neighbor asked Rose to move the pond. Rose, in turn, flipped right the hell out ... and waltzed off to commission a large lawn statue of a hand giving the middle finger to the neighbor’s house.
We’re absolutely not making that up.
The lawn ornament became -- and remains -- a fixture on Rose’s front yard, letting everyone know exactly what she thinks of her neighbor and creeping out every passerby. Ironically, the message it delivers is more than a little out of date. After a period of feuding, Rose’s mother became extremely ill, and around the same time, the neighbor’s wife suffered the same. Faced with vastly larger human tragedies than any koi pond or obscene stone gesture in the world could hope to convey, the two decided to bury the hatchet and became fire-forged friends. Good enough friends that they didn’t even remove the statue, in fact. After all, you know how the old saying goes: Once you’ve been angry enough to get a statue just to tell someone to go screw themselves, there’s no going back. Wait, is that a saying?
Regardless, that’s who you are now. Own it.
Own it.
A Woman Countered Her Neighbor’s Barking Dog With 16 Years Of Opera
As awesome as dogs are, no one likes a mutt that keeps on barking. Not even other dogs, that’s why they keep barking right back. Don’t bother to Google that; we’re pretty sure science totally backs that up.
In 2002, a woman living in Sturovo, Slovakia, certainly objected to the vocal stylings of a neighbor’s dog. When it became apparent that the woofing situation wasn’t about to improve, she felt compelled to create a distraction for herself, and a measure of aural vengeance to any dog-owning neighbors in the immediate vicinity. So she started blasting an aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s famous La Traviata opera, performed by Placido Domingo. That ... sounds like a fun little measure of educational noise right at the nasty neighbor, doesn’t it? A downright roguish little slice of revenge?
Sure. It might have been. The trouble is that she never got around to stopping. She blasted that same damn aria, non-stop, at full blast, from sunrise to late at night for 16 freaking years.
Pixabay
This. Outside. Constantly.
As one might guess, this habit rapidly transformed her from a cunning dog-shutting-up genius to the town’s decidedly worst neighbor. As months turned into years and years turned into a decade and a half, people grew desperate. Nothing short of a strategically placed missile (possibly filled with barking dogs) seemed to stop the opera barrage, and the locals started airing their gripes in the media. “The whole street is suffering”, one neighbor lamented in an interview. “I love Placido Domingo,” another said. “But not like this.”
Eventually, the media-charged accusations of harassment finally reached the authorities, and they arrested the Opera Lady in 2018. She might be facing up to three years in jail -- though if we compare her case with the British woman who in 2017 got two months for playing Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” for half an hour, it sort of sounds like a slap on the wrist.
The Seafood Restaurant Back Alley Feud
It was 2017, and a Washington DC resident known as Tim had a problem. He lived in an apartment where the windows faced the back alley. Said alley was also home to the dumpsters of two nearby restaurants, Corduroy and Baby Wale, both owned by restaurateur Tom Power. All of this was fine, provided you ignored the view. The problem was that both restaurants used the back alley as their private landfill. Tim frequently saw overflowing dumpsters, ignored food deliveries, and broken glass. It would’ve been bad form for virtually any business, but these were seafood restaurants, which meant that every single time they made a mess of the alley it came with a side order of rotten fish stench.
One night, the kitchen staff cleaned their facilities after a lobster special by ... hosing everything out into the alley, which left the entire thing smelling like what was lovingly described as “a post-apocalyptic Long John Silver’s.” Gross.
For Tim, it was the final straw. He contacted the Health Department and asked them to look into the restaurants, because come on.
An inspection found no real health code violations, but the way Tim had dared do something about the fishy hell his life had become deeply insulted and enraged Power, who reacted to the situation with all the tact and poise of an 11-year-old online gamer:
Washingtonian
Yes, a presumably adult man with multiple restaurants in his charge responded to complaints about his garbage by setting up a large sign that said that Tim needs a boyfriend. Is that ... is that a gay joke? Because if so, we don’t get it. If complaining about stuff like a never-ending stream of rotting fish guts under your window means you need a boyfriend, we guess we all need one.
What Power forgot was that Tim wasn’t exactly the only person living in the building. Literally everyone with their windows facing the alley were faced with the banner, including a single lady who thought that the message was meant for her, and marched in to Corduroy to complain. This did nothing to rectify the stupid banner situation, and neither did the complaints from the building’s managers. Power remains completely unapologetic about his commando tactics -- if anything, he’s planning to up the ante. “If the guy’s going to keep harassing me, I’m going to harass him back,” he says, and happily adds that he wants to find out Tim’s full address so he can add his apartment number to the banner.
Oddly, this was Tim’s first call to the Health Department, and he has only lived in his apartment for four years. Yet, Power insists that Tim has somehow been calling health inspections on him for a full 11 years, and seems to consider him something of an arch-nemesis. When asked to describe Tim, Power also appears to be talking about a completely different person, which ... what? It’s like the lady who thought that the banner’s message was directed at her was not the only case of mistaken identity here.
Regardless, Tim should seriously consider moving very, very far away before Power finds out where he lives.
The Neighbor Who Built A Giant Fence From Used Tires And Called It Art
Take a look at this glorious stack of old tires:
Charlotte Observer
Wow, the safety guy responsible for that particular race track’s tire barriers doesn’t mess around, right? The thing is, that’s not a race track -- it’s the end product of a particularly petty neighbor dispute between the McKinney and Guyer families, who live in the ironically named Pleasant Gardens community outside Marion, NC. Precisely how their feud started is perhaps fortunately lost to history. A journalist tried to figure it out once, but the closest he got was a vague impression that someone once used someone else’s private driveway, words were exchanged, and things started snowballing until people were hiring surveyors to check property lines, fences were discussed, and no one talked to each other for six months.
It was a perfectly ordinary scene of everyday American awfulness, until one day: BAM! Giant tire wall.
Jennifer Best Guyer, who erected the “fence” without warning, constructed her masterpiece out of 150-250 tires (the number depends on which family you ask) that she dug up from a nearby landfill. Shockingly enough, this did little to alleviate the tension between families. “This is not a fence,” Karen McKinney commented. “It is a solid waste spiteful pile of trash, hazardous to the environment and an eyesore to look at.” Yeah, it’s pretty hard to disagree with her, really. That looks an awful lot like someone dumping a bunch of junk in your backyard. Guyer, of course, disagreed anyway. She views the tire wall as a crafts project, and says she got the idea from Pinterest. “It is a work of art,” she says. “I don’t think it’s ugly. I love it.” She also stated that she intends to leave the “artwork” up indefinitely and turn it into a monument. A monument glorifying the ancient deity of old, used tires, we presume.
Unfortunately for Guyer, her art installation is unlikely to confuse unsuspecting passersby for aeons to come. When the county found out about the tire wall, the officials immediately slapped her with a notice: She had 30 days to dismantle her masterpiece, or face repercussions. However, said “repercussions” turned out to be a whopping $50 fine, and Guyer has said that if the fence goes she’ll just replace it with “other art.”
We can’t help but feel that this particular feud is a gift that’s going to keep on giving for many years to come. Whether anyone likes it or not.
Rand Paul Gets Tackled By His Fireball-Happy Neighbor
Look, it’s 2018. No one assumes that politicians are paragons of virtue and level-headedness by default. Then again, no one assumes that they habitually indulge in ridiculous cartoon feuds that involve body tackles, strange debris vendettas and actual fireballs, either. Still, that’s precisely what Kentucky senator Rand Paul apparently gets up to in his spare time, if court documents obtained by the media are anything to go by.
Here’s how the papers secured by Bowling Green Daily News say things went: Paul’s sparring partner was (of course) his next door neighbor of 17 years, Dr. Rene Boucher. It’s unclear just how long the two have been scuffling like Donald Duck and Neighbor Jones. Paul denies they have any previous history, and claims Boucher merely dislikes him and his politics. Boucher, on the other hand, denies ... what Paul just said, really. Still, the following quick look at their antics in September and early November of 2017 does paint a picture of two men who have careened way past the brink of warfare, and are now happily loading their ballistae in full armor.
First, the senator decided to separate his property from Boucher’s with a strategy pulled straight out of Jennifer Best Guyer’s playbook: He hauled a 10' wide and 5' tall pile of crappy branches right on the brink of the line separating his yard from Boucher’s property, right in the line of sight from the good doctor’s patio. Boucher gazed upon the huge pile of debris for a few weeks, rage slowly building inside him, then eventually decided take matters into his own hands, and removed the pile.
A few days later, Paul rebuilt it.
Gage Skidmore
“This brush pile will remain, dammit!”
This set Boucher ablaze, and not just metaphorically. Deciding to fight fire with fire, and completely misunderstanding the aforementioned analogy, he doused the pile in gasoline and lit it up. Unfortunately, he had underestimated his target’s flammability. The debris pile erupted in a fireball that gave Boucher second degree burns on his arms, neck and face.
The very next day, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that his half-charred neighbor was at the “casting actual fireballs like a wizard” stage of neighborly rivalry, Paul stood on his property, happily blowing leaves onto Boucher’s yard. Boucher stared. Then, Paul started carrying branches. Boucher stared more. Then, Paul started once again rebuilding the offending pile of debris. And that’s when Boucher snapped.
That, friends, is the story of how Dr. Rene Boucher charged at the unsuspecting Senator Rand Paul and straight up tackled him to the ground, breaking several of Paul’s ribs in the process.
The two have since moved their feud to the courtroom. The fate of the branch pile is currently unknown.
