Posts Tagged ‘neighbors’

Don’t Forget Your Ear Protectors

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Another ear post?! Lord almighty. No, today’s post actually references the ungodly noise blasting from what seems like every corner of our quiet little neighborhood today. I went out for a bike ride at 9:30 this morning, at which time everything seemed normal. By the time I got back, our street was packed with trucks, trailers and construction equipment, as apparently half of the residents decided to do major projects on their homes on the same day.

Since then, our ears have been assaulted with a never-ending din, ranging from gas-powered compressors running power washing equipment to our next-door neighbors doing some kind of major renovation that involved drilling anchors into the concrete between our homes, grinding on aluminum, hammering on the walls and parking their trucks and cars all over the street. It didn’t help that it’s garbage pickup day, with all the associated noise and clutter that inevitably brings.

Most of it has stopped by now, but the metal grinding is still going on.

Today brought some of the nicest weather we’ve had in southwest Florida in literally years — cool, but not chilly, with a pleasant breeze blowing. Too bad the only thing blowing in through my office room’s open window was the smell of cigarettes from the smokestack neighbors.

Part of me wonders whether they’re trying to add lots of upgrades to their house next door, because they need them to offset the huge chunk of value they’ve removed from their property by painting the garage floor electric blue.

But I’m perilously close to sounding like a crabby old coot right about now, so I’ll stop. At least I’m not leaving passive-aggressive anonymous letters of complaint in their mailbox.

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Welcome to Wednesday — It Blows.

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From the word go, this day has seemed determined to test my patience.

This morning we were awakened by the ungodly sound of some sort of strange sawing, thumping, hammering combination that seemed to be coming from all around us. In fact, it’s coming from our neighbors. We live in an attached townhome, but until now, the 6-inch poured concrete wall between our units has prevented us from hearing anything our neighbors have done. This morning, though, they appear to be engaged in some kind of whole-house renovation. There’s constant hammering to be heard in every room of our home, and a pick-up truck with a mobile workshop in a trailer is in their driveway, from which continuous grinding, circular-sawing or something is going on. According to the lettering on the trailer, they may be installing hardwood floors.

Meanwhile, my previous employer has started to really tax my patience, now that I’ve taken this side job with them. They want to get their huge new web portal (one large enough to be run by its own company) built and online with 90% of the proposed content by October 15th. Not only am I designing it from the ground up, but they have one engineer who’s going to write the entire content management engine from scratch. What blows me away is that these folks have been in the business of developing websites for longer than I have, and yet the CEO — who has always had a penchant for unrealistic deadlines — still just doesn’t get it. Either that, or — and this is the more likely — he deliberately sets deadlines that are beyond insane as a way of ensuring that everyone works at a manic pace for the entire duration of the project, which is a pretty shitty way to treat people in my estimation.

If that wasn’t bad enough, last weekend I spent approximately 14 hours developing a prototype of the site homepage, only to have them come back to me on Monday and say that they had decided to change the focus from a primarily fact-driven base of information (drug information, medical research, etc.), to a community-driven resource (forums, comments, etc). This, of course, completely shifts the weight of the various content and renders the homepage prototype useless.

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