THUMP. BUMP. WHUMP. If you’ve ever lived on the bottom floor, these kinds of noises might be all too familiar — but what’s going on up there? When you go knock on your upstairs neighbors’ door to discuss the noise, they never seem to have any idea what you’re talking about. Here are a few theories that you may want to ponder next time you feel compelled to go upstairs and investigate.
Your neighbors might be…
- Hosting a WWE Fan Club gathering. I mean, realistically, you can’t meaningfully discuss the results of the latest showdown without demonstrating just how much it hurts when someone’s head bounces off of a metal railing. In the case of your neighbors, who probably don’t have a metal railing in their upstairs apartment, the kitchen counter — which is obviously the most logical substitute — will do in a pinch. Thus, several very loud thumps in a row followed by a period of quiet and then some more random booms are probably just a wrasslin’ fan club in action.
- Practicing juggling… using bowling balls. They say the hardest part of juggling is learning control, and the best way to learn control is to juggle with something that’s really hard to control, and then backing down to a normal object. So don’t worry; all of those incredible, window-rattling bangs that come in rapid succession are just the results of someone improving their artful performance.
- Testing the crush weight of the floor. This is a valuable service for any property manager. It pays to know what kinds of impacts your flooring can sustain so that you can purchase appliances that won’t run the risk of damaging your floors. Obviously, the landlord is paying your upstairs neighbor to occasionally drop objects of varying weights and densities on different parts of the floor (at different hours of the day and night, because clearly you have to control for all variables). Just smile and thank your neighbor for providing such a useful service.
- Learning Ukemi. Judo is surging in popularity, and with it has emerged the practice of Ukemi. Ukemi is the Judo practitioner’s art of falling without hurting yourself. It is, in large part, about spreading the impact over as much of the floor as possible and hitting all at once. So if what you’re hearing are loud, single thumps with no definable point of impact, it’s pretty clear you have a budding martial artist living upstairs.
Are there more reasonable explanations than these for the noise you hear from upstairs? Of course not! And if your upstairs neighbor tries to tell you otherwise, be sure to inform them that you know the truth, and their fan club activities and bowling ball-juggling Judo-wrestling landlord-funded experiments are not going unnoticed.
