Now, not that I want this blog just to be about everything which bewilders / annoys me about people.. there isn’t enough space on the internet (it’s running out of room you know). Plus, I am extremely happy at the moment because two new dogs have joined our little pack! Both rescue dogs from Greece; one is a fat little Pointer cross of some sort, and the other is a little black puppy of indeterminate breed. Both of them are pure class.. pictures to follow!
However – although I am very happy - I really have to write about my annoyance at the ‘lady who cleans the yard of our apartment block’. I don’t know what else to call her. I can’t call her ‘cleaning lady’ or ‘maintenance person’ because neither of those terms would be remotely accurate. All that she does is sweep the yard once a week, and leave all the sweepings in a corner where they are instantly blown back all over the place by the prevailing winds from Russia. Oh and also she sometimes mops the yard (?) in a very erratic fashion, and then uses the same mop on the windows. Anyway; she hates us.
Let me explain. Our (first) dog can sometimes get a little irritated by people in ‘her’ territory; i.e. people walking past the apartment making a bit too much noise – we live on the ground floor, facing the yard. She also wasn’t too keen on visitors in the apartment, at first, and would show her annoyance by making a loud warbly growly noise – a bit like if Shirley Bassey and Barry White had a canine lovechild. She’s getting better now, but not every visitor has the time for her ‘gentle introduction’ phase – so we put her in another room sometimes if she’s warbling too much. Well, we had to do this when a couple of guys turned up to fit the new washing machine. (The old one was an ancient toploader with a manual which informed us that ‘WOMEN OF FIFTY LANDS SAY YES TO THE EFFICIENCY’.)
Anyway, the guys are fitting the washing machine, the dog barks for about 1-2 minutes. Yes, I know it’s annoying – I’m sorry. We’re working on it. She is a rescue dog who has had no previous training.. and yes I know that doesn’t mean other people should have to suffer her. But come on, a bit of barking.. What absolutely does not help was the fact that IMMEDIATELY the workmen leave, the ‘cleaning lady’ starts pounding on our door. The dog is just about calm, realising they’re gone, and suddenly.. BOOM BOOM BOOM and she’s yowling again. So, narrioch asks whoever is outside to wait for a moment. No, obviously this is crucially important – BOOM BOOM BOOM. Narrioch hops outside and this lady is standing there, yelling about how the dog was barking and how it was disturbing everyone. Narrioch apologises but the lady won’t go.. she changes tack and starts shouting about how she had cleaned the yard that morning and we had ruined it by having our washing machine fitted. Now, about four miniscule pieces of polystyrene were visible on the ground just outside our apartment, which must have fallen off the packaging for the new machine. Well.. okay. Clearly we would have cleaned those up as soon as we had become aware of them, but the old washing machine was still warm in its bed and the guys had left about 2 minutes before. Again, narrioch apologises, but that’s not good enough – now she wants to know whether we own the apartment or rent it, and what happened to the previous occupant. SHE’S IN THE CELLAR… I have no idea, she moved out about a year ago, were we supposed to get permission from you before we moved in? Anyway – she wandered off shouting incoherently and since then she has amused herself by banging her mop against our door every time she goes past. Until today!
So, today we had a non-event of an event with the dogs. We have subsequently realised that we need to get a stairgate, because they’re slippery as eels. Anyway, one of them (T-Bone, the fat little tank) slid out past us today and started trotting around in the yard. I dash out straight away to get him, but of course he thinks this is a great game and gallops about faster with his little John Wayne bowed legs. The dog is out in the yard for no more than one minute when suddenly, cleaning lady appears and starts howling: ‘your dog is in the yard! Your dog is in the yard! It is not on a leash!’ Oh, thanks, I thought that was a pigeon. ‘Your dog is in the yard!’ So.. a relatively easy situation becomes mega-stressful for all concerned, and T-Bone is wondering why the hell this woman is having a meltdown over nothing. He trots up for a treat and goes back inside the flat. Woman walks off again, banging her mop, bellowing, no doubt to report us to.. well, I don’t even know who she could report that to.
Now.. I love this place.. I just really resent having to feel awkward that we’re going to bump into this woman when we could quite easily have got along fine (and we did, on our first brief meeting). I absolutely understand that it is a problem if my dogs bark or run about in the yard, but those events have occurred, respectively, once; and each time narrioch and I have been doing our best to stop them from happening. I can’t stand irresponsible dog owners. I also understand that people might be alarmed by dogs, but it’s not as if fat little T-Bone is a huge Cerberus with babies’ limbs hanging out of his slobbering chops. What I can’t understand is.. why people feel the impulse to complain so readily and so openly. Many’s a time that I have observed people behaving in a bizarre or annoying manner, but I can’t imagine having a temper short enough that I would instantly start shouting at them. For example, when cleaning lady yelled at narrioch about the dog (who was being quieter than she was at the time), she kept repeating ‘there is a baby, there is a baby’ as if this was supposed to be of some great importance. Yes, there is a baby living in our apartment block (so? Why does everyone have to be so obsessed with babies anyway?) It is living right above us, in fact; and it bellows and wails enough to wake us up and keep us up, staring at the wall, getting Vietnam flashbacks from the screams. Do we rush upstairs and pound on the door to scream back at it, or at the parents? No. And I know that babies are made out of white gold and their hair is threads of phoenix spit, and I will just never get it because I don’t have a baby, nor do I have any desire to ever do so. And I also know that my dog shouldn’t bark. But what does the porcelain baby have to do with it? The little darling screams bloody murder all day and everyone thinks that’s charming. I just don’t get it.
What also makes me laugh about the whole situation is that there is another dog living in the building, who this very morning was in the yard running about happily – and that dog is never leashed, and has run up to ours with its teeth bared more than once. But it’s okay, because that’s a poodle. Pretty much everyone else here is great, though, and doesn’t mind the silly warbly dog even if she does grumble at them in the yard (because if they are calm, and let her smell their hand and everything, she wags at them like a lunatic).
