MSD

It doesn't come up much on TFP, but on the Something Awful forums there's a fairly constant flow of "my neighbors suck" threads, and about 80% of the time the person complaining is being unreasonable or just refusing to talk to them politely, and the other 20 the neighbors are really bad. That's why I was direct about making sure he'd tried the polite way first.

For future reference, from what I've seen and experienced, the single most successful way to deal with disruptive neighbors, whether it's noise, light, or whatever, is to talk to them civilly and politely, and if they don't understand, ask them to turn on the music/lights/whatever and come into your house and see how irritating it is. Despite my attitude toward the majority of people, I think that most cases of people being inconsiderate, especially to those who live around them, are because they don't realize they're doing something wrong.

We hated most of my friends' neighbors at their old house because instead of talking to us, they'd just call the police, who would come over, ask us nicely to quiet down, and leave. One guy walked over during one summer, told us nicely that the spotlight in the back was keeping his wife and kids awake, and after that we always made sure to point it away from his house. We never bothered with the ones who would call the cops as soon as they saw more than three cars in the driveway because we felt no need to act civil toward them when they didn't give us the courtesy of being civil toward us.