by Carolyn McFann

Created on: March 22, 2009

Home is meant to be a refuge from the stressors and craziness of the world. After working hard all day in offices and cubicles full of people, most people look forward to retreating to their own personal shell as they go home and forget the day's workload. Some of us work from home, like myself, and must be disciplined about our workdays if we want to put food on the table and live a respectable life. So what does one do if the inner peace, concentration and relaxation are interrupted by someone next door, who is unable to mind their own business? Aside from hiring a lawyer to go after them, the peace loving person must cope without becoming a victim.

Undesirable neighbors come in all shapes, sizes and socioeconomic backgrounds, an equal opportunity annoyance. Sometimes it's just no big deal, but there are those who, due to unseen forces inside their heads, are just unable to find productive things to do with themselves and prefer to nose their way into other peoples' business for fun or sport. When moving in a condo complex in the not so far past, it came to my attention rather quickly that the head of the condo association of my building was, well, someone to stay away from. A single woman like myself but older, with no apparent hobbies but spending the day out of her unit, finding fault with little things that just don't matter in the grand scheme of things. I chalked it up as just a weird personality quirk, no big deal.

Then, the knocks on the door started. She alerted me that a box was at my front door, or that there were some boxes downstairs in front of our mailboxes, inquiring whether or not they were mine. She appeared to be the "watchdog" of the building, using her title of condo association president to earn the the authority to loom large over any tiny discrepancy to her domain, an average condo complex in the middle of Florida suburbia. Her kingdom, if only in her mind, this complex represents something to control and protect. Keeping order in the neighborhood is a noble goal, unless you're the one causing trouble in order to enforce the rules.

Making friends with my neighbors, it then became clear to me that living in this condo resembled a soap opera, with overly dramatic characters running around causing trouble on a fairly predictable basis. One man told me that one neighbor hated his old truck and threatened to have it towed for being, well, ugly. The complainer, of course, was no innocent with a sportscar that was registered in another state,

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