Complaint Letter From A Swiss Neighbor
Rob came home from work yesterday and found a little note left on our front door. Our neighbor downstairs is obviously not happy with us being up later then 10 PM. The note says they are sleeping so they can get up and go to work. Also that we have heavy feet stomping around after 10 PM. I was home all day when the note was left, why didn't they just knock on the door? Not that it would have helped anyway. They would probably just blabber in French and I would stare and say "Uhuh" then "Merci". I also noticed it is typed on a typewriter on a piece of graph paper. It isn't handwritten like you guess a neighborly complaint letter to be. Oh well, the swiss love their rules! I guess this comes in the package of city living in Geneva.
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7 comments:
I never like anything written in french anyways.
Oh, the Swiss...
Once a friend of mine had a neighbor come knock on her door. He asked her to please quit cooking because the smell was making his pregnant wife ill... yeah. Sorry, dude. People have to eat, so your wife is just going to have to deal with it!
I can't believe they went to the trouble to type it. That's amazing.
Hum ... If I may say, this is poor French (probably poorer than my English) ...
Biem with an "m"? Are these people pretending to be native francophones? :P Hee hee. I hope you're saving that gem of a neighborly note for posterity — what a great souvenir!
Haha, they forgot to turn on the typewriter's spellcheck! Weee heeheeheee!
The most important thing is to not be intimidated by them. The Swiss laws (regardless of what anyone tells you) are ok for tenants, and it is very difficult to enforce complaints like this. Often the Swiss complain with the view that you will back off and run and hide out of worry about your legal standing. We had one, and it became intolerable - similar, and we were not being unreasonable. Faced it head on, called her bluff, sent a formal letter (written in good German - Zurich), copied our landlord, and the landlord came back with the response that they hoped our neighbour would be more accommodating due to flat living...:) Often the landlord is aware of the difficult ones... good luck... you have rights... same applies to the stove in the recent post.
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