To the person who left me a card with this note:  Hi there, I live two floors below you (ground-floor patio). Can you please stop letting water pour off of your balcony and sweeping your dirt over the edge? You’re making a mess on my patio—piles of dirt, puddles of dirty water, and a sp lash zone that includes a bunch of my plants, the table + chairs, and sometimes me. Thanks, Apt. #109 P.S. You just made 2 giant stains on the patio I spent 3 hours cleaning yesterday! Hi, Apartment 109— First of all, what the fuck is this—a grievance delivered inside a greeting card? If water was landing on you, you could have yelled, “Hey, what the fuck? You’re splashing me!” like a normal human being. I would have yelled back, “Oh shit, sorry! I didn’t realize!” and the entire problem would have been solved before you had time to commission the commemorative stationery. Second, how the fuck do you know I was “sweeping dirt over the edge”? Were you standing on my balcony supervising? I was not deliberately sweeping shit onto your patio. Leaves, potting-soil residue, and ordinary outdoor debris can blow through or over a balcony railing because—and brace yourself for this shocking development—wind exists. If some of it landed downstairs, that does not mean I stood up here maliciously launching garbage at your furniture. As for the water, I had no way of seeing that runoff from two floors above was reaching your patio. Had you used your words when you first noticed it, I would have fixed it weeks ago. Instead, you apparently let the irritation accumulate, cleaned for three hours, wrote a victim-impact statement, added a dramatic postscript, and signed it not with an actual human name but “Apt. 109.” By the way, “Apt. 109” is not a name. Unless your parents named you Apartment and 109 is your middle name, use your fucking name like a normal person. You know who I am and where I live, but you apparently need witness protection before requesting a plant saucer. If you want to communicate neighbor-to-neighbor, the minimum requirement is briefly participating in the interaction as an identifiable neighbor rather than an anonymous municipal code-enforcement unit. Also—and I realize this may come as startling regional news—you have an outdoor ground-floor patio in Seattle. It rains here. Quite a bit, actually. Water routinely falls directly out of the fucking sky and lands on outdoor plants, tables, chairs, patios, and occasionally human beings. I will contain runoff from my plants because that part is within my control, but I cannot guarantee that your patio will remain a federally designated moisture-free zone. Now that I know what is happening, I’ll address the runoff and be more careful about loose debris. Problem solved. In the future, please knock on my door, yell up, or leave a normal two-sentence note before privately assembling a fucking criminal case against my lavender. Sincerely, The Alleged Balcony Menace Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous, and maybe we’ll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to [email protected]. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty. The post Please Just Yell at Me!!! appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less