The Wasted Terabyte
When I was 13 years old, a new neighbor moved into the house next door. We shared a driveway with her. The families in our neighborhood are really close to one another and everyone likes to have get-togethers and block parties.
So, when she moved in, we all got together and had a little celebration to welcome her. Immediately, it became clear that she did not like my dad. A while later, we found out that she’d been telling our neighbors that my dad was being inappropriate to her at the party.
I know my dad would never act like that, but he isn’t a native English speaker (he’s Middle Eastern, which is relevant to the story). Maybe some wires got crossed and there was a misunderstanding. So my dad went over to apologize to her. It did not go well.
She told my dad to leave, which he promptly did. Then, she put up the security cameras. They absolutely covered her house getting views of pretty much every angle including lots of shots of our shared driveway. “Whatever,” we thought. “A lady has a right to put cameras on her house”.
But then the authorities started showing up. She called them claiming that we had messed with her cameras and that my friends and I were shining laser pointers at them.
The officers ended up leaving pretty quickly because the supposed “offense” she accused us of was not captured on any of her cameras. We thought she was done with her antics after that, but we were wrong—she then started claiming that we were putting something poisonous her yard.
She spent a lot of time on her lawn gardening and growing plants, and for some reason, every six months or so, she’d cut everything down and start over. Anyway, the authorities came back but they couldn’t find any evidence. We didn’t even have any poison, nor had her cameras picked anything up.
We had absolutely no motive to poison her lawn. So she started an inquest with the department of agriculture. A pesticide use investigator showed up, interrogated us, and took samples from her yard.
While that was going on, we had a few other interesting encounters with her. Once, she bought a giant floodlight and pointed it into our windows in the middle of the night. The fire department had to come and unplug it.
Another time, our dinner was interrupted when a massive hazmat truck came blaring down our street. Men in heavy gear poured out and charged into her house, then, minutes later, they disappointedly filed out.
One guy came and told us that she had bought a Geiger counter and used it wrong, and she had thought that we had irradiated her house. Finally, things came to a head when she sued us to get an order of protection. She claimed that my dad was a member of a sleeper cell intent on destroying her.
She also claimed that he had used his skills as an engineer to develop a device that she referred to as a “white ion laser” which would allow him to turn invisible and sneak into her house.
She submitted one terabyte of film from her cameras, all of which was annotated with such incriminating evidence as “My neighbor leaves the house, my neighbor enters the house.” There were also tons of photos and notes. But that’s not the most horrifying part.
It was here that we discovered that her cameras were pointed into my bedroom and she had been filming me for years. I was a young lad by this point so there’s probably video evidence of some pretty embarrassing teenage behavior out in the aether now.
We later legally forced her to move the cameras, but she kept moving them back, so I just kept my blinds closed for the better part of a decade. During the trial, the department of agriculture report came back.
It was determined that our neighbor had poisoned her own lawn by over-fertilizing it. She received a fine for contaminating the groundwater. We obviously won the lawsuit and countersued her to get our own order of protection.
We also had to legally get the files on us at the FBI and CIA closed since she had reported us to both agencies. Despite losing the suit, she continued to live next to us, occasionally calling the authorities on us for non-issues. They were called on us a total of 37 times.
It’s now been ten years and she’s finally moving out. Why you might ask? Does she feel guilty for accusing us of all sorts of horrible stuff with no evidence for a decade? Had her paranoia finally driven her to move? No. She didn’t pay her property taxes for six years and her house got taken from her.
She tried to sue the city on a bunch of occasions as well and failed. This is only a summary of the situation. There are tons more. I haven’t even gotten into her kids, her horrible husband, the video she posted to YouTube of her dog passing… Story credit: Reddit / (squamesh)