And I want to be completely straight about the board.
I did not put it up for that building.
I did not put it up for the woman in 2A, or for the six flats in that file, none of which I knew about when I bought the pins.
I put it up because it finally happened to me.And it did not even happen to me very badly. A towel and a cushion and eleven weeks of being annoyed.
Six flats had worse and none of them got a board, because none of them had a woman on the floor directly below with a notebook and a grudge about a chair that used to be her mother’s.
Everything good that came out of it came out of a woman being annoyed about her own chair cushion, and I have had to sit with that, and I am not going to dress it up as anything else.
He moved out within four months.
Not because of the board. Because the board made people compare notes in a yard, and three separate complaints went in that month instead of one, and the management company has a threshold.
I found out afterwards that a couple on the second floor had been putting up with something for two years and had assumed they were the only ones.
That is what those fourteen complaints had all been missing. Not evidence. Each other.
Nobody has thanked me for it, which I find correct.
Two people have asked me whether I felt bad. I did not, and then about three weeks later I did, for about a day, and then it passed.
The day I felt bad was the day I took the board down, which I did myself, at seven in the morning, when the yard was empty.I took the pins out one at a time and put thirty-nine tea bags in a bin bag, and it took about twenty minutes, and it was the single most unpleasant thing in this entire account.
Because pinned up in rows they were evidence, and in a bag they were just rubbish off my own balcony, which is what they had always been.
I kept the labels. All thirty-nine, in an elastic band, in the drawer with the spare keys.
I do not know why and I have stopped asking.
And then this happened.
Three weeks after he went, somebody knocked on my door.
