House of Five Hundred Doors

I know it’s late, but I have some questions that have been bothering me for quite some time, so I figure now is as good as any to ask you a few simple questions.

What‘s that? It’s one o’clock in the morning? Oh, I’m sure you don’t mind. After all, you and your family don’t go to bed that early. Don’t bother to argue. I hear you every night.

First question: why did you spend so much money to install five hundred doors in your unit? Regardless where you originally came from, you have to admit it’s rather peculiar. Every other step one takes in your unit requires a slam of a door. Every night, all night long. It’s obvious nobody in your unit understands how to “close” a door, but only how to shut the door with a bang.

If you don’t know how to properly close a door, I will have to ask you to remove four hundred ninety-nine of them from your unit immediately. You see, there’s only so much door banging one can endure in certain amount of time, and I’m tired of stabbing the ceilings with the mop handle. I will have to fix the ceilings if I damage them, and I won’t like that.

Second question: is everyone in your unit a sumo wrestler? Not only this causes an unpleasant mental image to one’s mind, the echo of your every step ripples through your floors / our ceilings sounds like a kong sounding from afar. And you guys walk a lot. All night, every night. Add this to the banging of the five hundred doors you installed before you moved in, and you have a symphony of beneath-the-penthouse nightmare.

For your own good I suggest you lose weight immediately. If you fall through the ceilings one day from a heart attack, which won’t be far judging from the sound of your steps and the vibration of the walls, I will have to bill you for the repair. I won’t like that either, especially if you’re in a hospital and I‘m risking not having the expenses recovered--if you get my drift.

One more question: is your child half monkey half horse? He/she is obviously very young, judging from the screaming and the little steps he/she takes when running. It may be a lovely sight for you, the parents, to have an undisciplined wild beast racing in the house, screaming while slamming those five hundred doors, but not for your neighbors downstairs. Trust me on this one.

Oh, anoter thing about the kid--going to bed at ten or eleven o’clock is way too late for a child that young. In fact, going to bed at twelve, one, or two o’clock in the morning is way too late for you, too. How you manage to get up in the morning and go to work is beyond me.

I haven’t had a good night sleep in I don’t know how long. My eyes are scratchy dry and my skin is breaking out. The noise coming from above is stressing me to the point that the mop handle feels too weak of a gesture. I’m also getting more wrinkles from lack of sleep and anger. I really don’t like that.

The fact that you live on the top floor may have given you some superiority complex. Here’s a surprise--you still have to be considerate to your neighbors. Paying a little more doesn’t give you the right to forfeit common courtesy. Even a real penthouse dweller like Donald Trump would agree with me. Besides, it’s only a four-story building. You’re not that higher up.

These nuisances may be commonly accepted where you came from. People may not have the right to complain--about anything. It may be the very reason you left that country and sought a better life here. Why else would you uproot your family, travel thousands of miles to a place where nothing is easy and no one is familiar? I get that.

I just have one thing to say to you and all the horn-honking, traffic-cutting mad drivers in this town: don’t make this country a duplicate of that country. There’s a saying (and I’m sure you’re familiar with it) goes something like this: taking off one’s pants to break wind.

It makes your thousand-mile move totally unnecessary if you insist on behaving the old way. You might as well stay where you were in the first place.


(Other than raining one hundred eighty days a year and the few little things mentioned above, it really is a nice little town to live here. No really.)