Any adult will tell you; sleep is precious. It makes your immune system better, keeps weight down, reduces stress, improves your mood and helps you to think clearly. Without it, you’re likely to end up an absent-minded, emotional, snack-hungry mess. And one woman has taken to Reddit’s Am I The Asshole (AITA) thread to see if she’s in the wrong for filing a noise complaint about her neighbour whose baby wouldn’t stop crying and kept her up for weeks.
‘I live in an apartment. I’m a resident in a medical profession and I work 100-hour weeks plus a lot of additional hours of studying and paperwork,’ the original poster [OP] explained. ‘I hardly sleep as is [and] cannot wear ear plugs because I need to be able to hear my phone when I’m on call.
‘My downstairs neighbour had a baby last month,’ she continued. ‘Since she came home from the hospital I haven’t slept through the night. I’m woken up every 1-2hrs by the baby and this baby screams. I know the mom is trying her best- I’m sure she doesn’t want to be woken up either. But I’m losing it.
‘I have tried to talk directly to my neighbour,’ she added. [I wanted to ask] if she could stop walking around her whole apartment [spreading the noise to different rooms]…or maybe if there could be some soundproofing…But every time I’ve had the chance to go to her apartment she’s got a note about the baby sleeping and please don’t knock.
‘I do not have her number or other way to contact her (I feel weird about leaving a note and want to address it in person),’ the OP continued. 'So, I spoke to my landlord... I was very clear that I’m not trying to blame this woman, I just wanted to know if there could be some sound proofing done…The landlord said they’d look into options.’
The OP then explained how she’d had a day off mandated by her work because she was considered a risk to patients after falling asleep while standing up on duty due to exhaustion. ‘I was sleeping and woke up to screaming,’ she said of her day off. ‘The mother was furious with me and kept screaming about how I’m selfish and trying to kick out a single mom… neighbours were watching, and I kept trying to explain but she (and the baby) just kept screaming.
‘I lost it,’ she admitted. ‘I’m beyond exhausted and just screamed back. I told her her baby is so loud she might cost me my job and that I can’t function anymore because of her and that soundproofing isn’t the end of the world. If she can’t soundproof, she should be considerate and f*ck off from apartment living. She started crying and left…I feel awful about it. I know I shouldn’t have yelled.
‘My landlord called me earlier today and told me he heard about her coming to scream at me,’ the OP followed up in a later post. ‘He had no intention of evicting anyone. He spoke to her about when he could come and soundproof the apartment…She was never in danger of being evicted. I never wanted that either.
‘Babies cry, but I didn’t sign up for this,’ she added. ‘I think soundproofing is valid. Maybe it’ll disrupt this mother, but I’ve decided I don’t care. Long term this will be better for everyone.’
As the OP has already said, her neighbour isn’t in the wrong for having a crying baby. The villain of this piece appears to be the hospital who think it’s reasonable to have their employee working 100-hour weeks. It would be difficult for anybody to cope with this – regardless of whether they were sleep deprived or not.
As one Reddit user put it: ‘F**k judging between someone over-worked to the point of passing out whilst standing up and the young mother with the one month old infant. Both of you aren't assholes for trying to function.’