Unavoidable Piano Lessons
My apartment is usually nice and quiet. Once or twice the people downstairs cranked up their 60-million-watt Karaoke system, apparently to attract aliens from far-flung planets, but after I had a word with them they stopped.
Recently, however, I’ve been hearing a piano. Playing the same melody over and over again, it sounds nearby. Yet when I went around to all my neighbors, nobody admitted to having a piano. Some people had heard it, but nobody knew who the culprit was. I crept along with my ear to the hallway walls, listening for some clue. Was the building haunted?
On a whim, I went up two floors, but no piano. Then I went down two floors from my place. Ah-ha! It turned out to be the apartment two floors below me, though the people in the apartment below me, the alien-hunters, claimed to have never heard the piano. I can only assume that they’re actually deaf from all of the karaoke…either that or some strange construction fluke transmits sound around some apartments and into others.
It’s a student, I’m guessing. The parent or husband (I’m guessing, as I never actually saw the piano player) said they would stop playing in the mornings and waking me up. The problem is that they play during reasonable hours, when I can’t really raise any objections. But the constant sound of piano practice in my apartment is really, really distracting. I can’t have cover-up music on all the time. The torturing soul plays all weekend, when I’m home trying to edit. The same tune, over and over. The next time someone tries to impress me with their piano-playing skills, I’ll wonder how many of their neighbors went insane so that they could play “Imagine” whilst looking wistful for their friends.