tipping the scales

heinzscheisse and her daughter went all out today, and they are, i think, forever on my scheisse list.

sean and i were in two levels of the stairwell, putting together multiple items from ikea. i still hate ikea, by the way. i came up, and smelled the smell of someone having trouble on the hill. didn't think much of it, got my wrench, and was about to go back to work, when sean came up and started panicking. "something's on fire, what's on fire??!!!" i took him to the window, we looked down, and see a shiny bmw convertible parked in the street and two young guys standing around. they look up and tell us they are stuck. we tell them they are not the first (nor the second, or the third, and we've only been here for 3 months). they happen to be americans, so we communicate well. we tell them to come on up and chill on our balcony, we'll give them a beer while they wait for the car to cool down and see if they can back it up.

i'll try to make a loooong story short. the guys tell us that not less then two minutes after their trouble started, the nasty neighbor was outside yelling at them, holding her nose and yelling "schtinken, schtinken!!!"- which i didn't even realize was actually used in german. evidently, the daughter of the pair ran into the house, got a pad of paper, ran back outside and wrote down the plate numbers on the car.

the heinzscheisse's, the police, the driver, and sean

so i'm putting furniture together, sean's on the balcony chilling with our new friends, and i get the call to come outside and translate. because the neighbors have called the politzei (um, that's the german police). yep. our neighbors called the police because someone accidentally drove down the street and got stuck and made a bad smell. so i translate, tell then that we just met these guys, that their gps system led them down the street, and that our neighbors, and i quote, "have nothing but time, have made war with us because our dogs peed on the street, and are NOT nice." let me say, were my german better, i would have come up with something slightly less simplistic. so the police spend about 30 minutes talking to the nasty neighbors (who gesture REPEATEDLY at our house while the cop smiles at me in silent understanding) until we get the call that the BMW serviceman will arrive in an hour to take care of the problem.

we continue with beers on the balcony, bmw comes and can't fix the car, but the poor bmw guy ends up getting an earload from the neighbor as well. and evidently he had heard it before - because they have been down the same hill, for the same problem, and the police were called and the nasty neighbors were outside yelling at anyone and everyone they could. and wouldn't you know, they were back out again and yelling because we had laid something under the front wheel of the car so it wouldn't move forward, and they were concerned that this would be left there and they would not be albe to drive if they wanted to. in three months i have never seen or heard them take their car out once, but whatever. if they wanted to drive later, and this (slightly heavy but very moveable) thing was in the road, it would be the end of the world.

a tow truck was called, the car was removed, our new friends were returned to the car rental agency for a new car, and i hate my neighbors more than ever. but i learned something. i learned something about the kind of person i want to be. when someone gets stuck in front of my house, through no fault of their own (damn those gps systems), do i want to be the one who yells at them and calls the police? or do i want to be the one that invites them up for beer while they wait?

tough decision, but i think i'll go for the beer.