Manners and Mannerisms: Good walls make good neighbors

Whether you are in IU South Bend’s River Crossing Apartments, or in any of the other local apartment complexes, you have probably encountered your share of bad neighbors. 

Yet, in many typical college experiences a bad neighbor is considered to be the one who complains about your partying, but as IUSB is largely a commuter campus with a significant portion of non-traditional students, I will give the reader the benefit of the doubt, and say that studying is much more important than partying.

And if studying is important to you, you know how awful a bad neighbor can be and how many ways someone can be a bad neighbor.  While these ways are too numerous to list, here is how you can avoid being that person yourself.

While the walls of my current apartment are slightly thicker than the last one, I can still hear just about every time my neighbors watch TV, play video games, listen to music, fight with their spouses, or slam their cabinet doors.  If the walls in your apartments are similarly thin, you can be respectful of your neighbors’ hearing (and study habits) by keeping the noise to a minimum, using ear buds or headphones when possible, and being gentle with your roommates and your home furnishings.

Also, recall that not everyone in an apartment is a college student.  While you may have class only twice a week, or have several days where classes don’t begin until 2 p.m., remember that your neighbors may have class earlier, even as early as 8 a.m., and some may need to get up earlier still to go to work. 

There is no way to know what that person does at work, and there are several professions that would not benefit from sleep deprivation.  I know I want the person fixing my brakes or doing my taxes or cooking my food to have as much sleep as they need, and turning off anything that makes noise in my apartment at a reasonable hour helps that happen.

Into the life of even the most diehard student, sometimes a party falls.  However, as a responsible person, it falls to each of us to reverse the trend of using college as an excuse to drink to excess.  If you host a party at your apartment, make sure that your friends do not make nuisances of themselves, either by driving home drunk, or dropping things off the balcony.  I’ll leave the nature of those ‘things’ to your imagination, just remember that anything that goes down may come up again…at the next tenant meeting.

A few last cautions: remember that your apartment does not end at your front door.  The entryways, the stairs, and the parking lot are communal areas and owned by the apartment complex. 

Any damage done to or litter left in those areas may be traced back to its owners.  And while the official noise curfew in South Bend is between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., it is only courteous to extend your quiet hours a bit in either direction as the people you wake up abruptly today may be the ones reviewing your résumé tomorrow.