How to Catch a Liar!
So Troutmouth hasn’t been able to practice much lately because our “neighbors” were “complaining”. Specifically, the woman that lived literally about 10 feet away from the shop where we practice worked a night job, so she slept days. Well, about two months after we had quit playing there (due to “her” “complaints”), she moved out, and I considered that the go-ahead, since that was the only neighbor who really had a place to complain (we stop one hour BEFORE noise pollution laws come into effect). I also had this gut feeling that my dad wanted to put a stop to the band for other reasons, and made up the complaint stories.
Well, we recently added my friend Adam to the band, so we have two guitars, and we decided the only way we were going to find out if the neighbors really had a problem was to plow ahead with practice. Nobody said a thing, so I figured we were a go. Tonight, a couple weeks after that practice, everybody had a couple free hours and we were able to organize another, but as I headed out to the shop I noticed somebody new had moved into the rental right next to us. This rental is owned by our neighbor, so any complaints go directly to her, which in turn go to us. At first we thought “Noise pollution isn’t a legal issue until 10PM, we should just practice, we have a right to”, but then we thought we’d be nice guys and ask the neighbor if he cared that we practiced. We confronted him, a guy probably only a couple years older than us, and he was really cool about us playing, saying it didn’t bother him at all.
We played for a couple hours and by the time we finished, my dad had left to go grab groceries. He returned nearly two hours later and confronted me about it. Read how he gets caught in his own bullshit not once, not twice, but a whopping three times:
Dad: I thought we put a stop to that band.
Me: Dad, nobody cares.
Dad: Well, the neighbor called and her new renter wants to know what all the noise is about.
Me: Hmmm…that’s weird, since I personally talked to that guy and got his permission to play. In fact, he seemed to encourage it.
Dad: Well…I don’t know the whole story, maybe he didn’t complain, but she called and wanted to know what was going on.
Me: We practiced last week and nobody said a thing…
Dad: Nah, she called last week too, but I haven’t seen you to bring it up.
Me: HA! We DIDN’T practice last week!
Dad: Well maybe it was the week before, I don’t remember. All I know is she called me tonight and complained since she thought this wasn’t going to happen anymore.
Me: *Grabs phone and scrolls to last entry on caller ID* Strange, because the last call on here is from 5PM, 3 hours before we started.
Dad: *Begins to say something and intentionally trails off as he goes outside to grab more groceries from the car*
When he returned with the last bags of groceries, I was going to follow up and say that if he didn’t want us practicing there, he could just tell us, rather than making up stories, and he really wouldn’t be a badguy. But instead, he completely (and quite obviously) changed the subject to something completely different. After that, I didn’t have the heart to bring it back up, since it was pretty clear that he understood how many of his own lies he got caught in.
A victory, yes, but a moot point, as we should be getting some warehouse space from a friend in the next month or so, and it will no longer be an issue. I just don’t appreciate being lied to.
January 16th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
just give up man
January 19th, 2006 at 12:25 am
kind of a shitty position for both of you to be in I bet
January 25th, 2006 at 10:25 am
Duuuuuuude, go to http://www.zombiedefense.org
It’s a site run by a friend of mine and his buddies. Pretty fuckin’ hilarious shit.