The Case of the Loud Asshole in Zara's Basement

an update from your very own shut-in detective....

The Case of the Loud Asshole in Zara's Basement

Status: Solved

On Wednesday of this week, Zara Katherine spent an enjoyable evening with Clark K. who, for the record, affectionately refers to her as his "client". Upon his post midnight departure, Zara prepared herself for sleep, crawled into her cozy bed, and reassured her monkey "Snuggly" that there was room in her heart for both him and that "human" man who just left. Before she was able to drift into dreamland, Zara was startled by an unfamiliar noise emanating from the basement. From the comfort of her bed she could not clearly decipher the foreign sounds though it was clear something unusual was afoot. Loathe to get out of her warm bed she waited anxiously for a few minutes hoping that the noise would go away. It did not. Zara got out of bed and walked to her backdoor and put her ear to it in an effort to better ascertain the situation. The noise appeared to be that of a man, who may or may not have been speaking Chinese (Mandarin?). She listened attentively for a second voice, but there was none. This led Zara to formulate the hypothesis that the culprit was either a drunken homeless person speaking in tongues to himself OR an inconsiderate neighbor having a loud, subterranean cell phone conversation with a friend in Beijing. Feeling equally sleepy and agitated, Zara opened her backdoor and slammed it shut hoping the sound would drive the man away. It did not. Fearful of confronting the individual and not wanting to call the landlord and/or police, Zara attempted to "think outside the box" to surmise a solution. She settled on setting up a "booby trap" in front her back door which consisted of various boxes and whatnot leaned against her backdoor so that if the man in the basement attempted to break into her apartment she would hear his entry and have time to save herself. She had a brief internal dialogue about whether or not she was a "fight or flight" person, but then decided it was way too late for hypotheticals and went back to bed. With her covers over her ears, Zara finally fell asleep and was pleased to wake up without injury the next day.

On Thursday, Zara relayed her tale to friends and co-workers who unanimously told her she should alert her property management company. She did so, and on that evening at approximately 9:30pm her phone rang. This surprised her because she was watching one of her favorite television programs, CSI, and most people knew not to call her during her dates with the boob tube. (Yet she knew, in all fairness, it was a lot to ask for her friends to keep up with ever-morphing viewing preferences.) The caller id revealed that it was her upstairs neighbor/property manager, Betty. Betty was calling to "follow-up" on Zara's phone call to the office. She informed Zara that though she was not certain, it was the consensus of the rental office staff that the man she had heard was most likely a tenant who was in the midst of a messy divorce and that the man was most likely yelling at his soon-to-be ex-wife on his cell phone while he was doing laundry in the basement. Betty strongly emphasized that 1:00am was no time to do laundry. Zara knew this as she and her fellow tenants had received numerous memos on various shades of colored paper reminding the tenants that there is "No Laundry" after 10pm. Though it was clear that this man's misuse of the laundry facilities was the greater infraction in terms of the management's agenda, Betty did acknowledge that he should not have been so loud. Furthermore, she informed Zara that in the future she should report any "disruptions" to the on-call maintenance people. She also told Zara “not” to call the police.

With that, the case was closed, and Zara fell asleep on the couch. Which poses the next mystery: Why can't Zara go to bed like a normal person?