Emailing your landlord to get something fixed is never a pleasant task. You're probably dealing with a problem that has bothered you for days, weeks or even months. It's usually a problem that's made you really angry or at least annoyed. When you're writing to complain about your noisy, scary or obnoxious neighbors, there's usually also an unspoken request - you want your landlord to evict them, or at least cause them severe financial distress in exchange for the emotional distress they've brought upon you.
There's a lot of different ways you can phrase a complaint. You can be sweet or vicious. You can threaten or beg. You can state your case and try to make it seem like your peace and quiet is more important than your neighbor's social life.
When I worked in property management I was not someone who could do anything to fix tenants' problems - I was in the leasing department, not maintenance or legal. However, my email address was sometimes the only contact info that a tenant still had on hand, so many of them sent their complaints to me. I was on the receiving end of hundreds of angry emails. There was nothing I could do about it but read them, and then hit the "Forward" button to send them on to the right place.
Today I've combed through my old email archive to find some excerpts to share with you. I'm not going to say much in the way of judgment. The authors of these emails were angry, frightened or dealing with other extremes of emotion. I'll leave it up to you to decide which tenants got it just right, which ones were brown-nosing and which just took their complaints into the realm of verbal abuse. Just bear in mind that these were among the 50 to 100 emails I would receive and respond to each day.
By the way, if you have issues with high blood pressure you might want to give this one a pass.
Please! Think of the children!
I wanted to issue a complaint about my next door neighbors. They have been in the building since the end of October, and it has been a problem ever since. They are constantly loud in the halls (screaming, cursing) and play their music loudly. The final straw for me was being awakened at 3:30 a.m. last night to a loud, screaming argument right out in the courtyard. It went on for about 15 minutes and other tenants in the building were yelling out their windows for these people to be quiet and to tell them that the police had been called. [...] As long as I have lived here (3 1/2 years) I have never seen or heard anything that bad. There are children in this building and I really don't think that anyone wants their children exposed to loud, foul-mouthed, drunken behavior on a constant basis. This used to be a very quiet building, but there has been no peace since they moved in here.
Please! Think of the kitties!
I'm writing to complain about our upstairs neighbors in 3W. A while back we had asked them if they could be a little quieter with their feet and they acted like they had no idea what we were talking about and ignored us when we knocked on their door, so we called in and someone sent them a letter from your office notifying them of our complaint. They came down and we talked about it. They said they would try to be a little quieter and we said we'd try to have a little grace for them.
The catfight continues this way...
