Neighbour just rung doorbell at 2.30am!

[greywolfie]

I'm now wide awake and fumming. She rung twice so I opened the front bedroom window as I worried it might be an emergency. Women stood there on her phone in tears and I thought - oh, she could need help.
My husband is on his way down to.open the door.
Then she says...."my cat is in your garden"
I mean - FFS!
I said "well your cat will get out of our garden"
"Really?"
"Yes. If your cat is still in our garden in the morning we will bring it back"
Shut window.
Husband then opened the door and she started telling him about the damn cat- I yelled at him to shut it.
He wanted to go out and get it but I said that was mad and would encourage the over protective cat mother to do it again in future.
For reference, we have 2 elderly cats that very rarely scale the fence. One night one got over very late and was struggling to make it back (we have stuff by our fence that would've also helped her bloody cat up, if he cared - but their side is just the bare fence). I was a bit worried but would NEVER have rung their bell in the middle of the night! About an hour later our old lady regained her energy and made it back.
AIBU to go round in the morning and point out you don't ring people's doorbells for this reason? It's batshit right?

At 2.30am, she'd be lucky I didn't go full gardyloo.

End of.

If you're waiting on blue lights in a fire you'll likely be long dead before they get there.

Sometimes it's better to engage with people, then deal with any silliness after, so that there is not a repeat.

I’m not surprised you were cross OP - I would have been furious. Who on earth wakes up their neighbours at 02:30 and again at 05:00 for anything less than an absolute emergency? Did she at least apologise at all?

Yep exactly! I would have been annoyed but would have helped anyway.

I wouldn't have knocked personally but when our indoor cat got out he was in a neighbours garden terrifiedand it was horrible. We just put tuna on top of the wall and wait for him to come back. I was really upset but unless he was in danger all I would have done is waited all night for him to come back.

Maybe an indoor cat and escaped?

NO.

If YOU choose to knock on a neighbour's door at 2.30 am then the onus is on YOU to explain why you are doing it. End of.

Good grief.

Yes this and when it suits. It’s like on one thread, the consensus is grow a back bone and tell them. But when you do, you’re unfair and unkind!? If this was a post asking if she should have said something in the moment at 2am it would have been a hard yes.

What happens the next time and the time after that? Jog off with that idea.

I mean we can speculate… still don’t know though.

Or we can care about distressed people and understand the problem.

What time after that ? I said OP needed to explain this was a one off and not to disturb her in the middle of the night again.

Urgh! WHY do people always put this insufferable phrase on here?!

#BeKind !!!!!!!!!!!!! Just NO. I would have gone nuclear on someone waking me at 2.30am because their CAT was in my garden.

For fuck's sake. 🙄

.

You can help and care about your crying neighbour in the night AND still let them know that you don’t appreciate the wake up call and to not to it again. Both can happen. You can also not shout orders at your husband not to help them too if that’s what he wanted to do.

Not a chance on MN. We got the gist early on. Don’t ‘enable’ other peoples’ mental health problems. No-one is saying it’s reasonable to knock neighbours up at that hour but the girl was young and clearly distressed. The lack of concern here for fellow man, above what’s inconvenient for ourselves is really concerning.

Or we don't care.

Works for me.

I don't always feel the need to #BeKind. Especially not to someone ringing my doorbell at 2.30am, because their cat is in my garden!

You do you though.

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Or we can not deliberately and unkindly annoy our neighbours when they are fast asleep and have work the next day for completely irrelevant and unimportant reasons. That is also unkind.

Yet again ‘be kind’ doesn’t mean ‘be kind no matter what’. There’s a difference, and that tired old hashtag isn’t as clever as you think it is.

Anyone in distress and crying when they have not bothered you before is not annoying, unimportant or irrelevant.

It does in the context it's always used here though. #Bekind because you never know what someone is going through. But sometimes their situation doesn't excuse their actions.

She bothered the OP twice (once at 2.30 and once at 5am) and also sent a letter to all her neighbours about her cat's perfectly normal behaviour.

That's not "only" bothering someone once. Its a pattern of selfish entitled behaviour

Wait, why aren’t you reading the OP’s response? She says that she didn’t stop her DH from helping and said to close the door as she suspected it could have been a danger to her and her family. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

Cat people. Omg. The entitlement. If you can’t handle your cat going into other people’s gardens or being fed by strangers or repeatedly getting trapped in outhouses or run over by cars then look after your bloody animals.
if dogs roamed free and shat in everyone’s gardens an walked into people’s houses and ate from other dogs’ bowls and kept getting hit by cars there’d be uproar.

right to roam is an outdated and unsafe concept for myriad reasons
if you are unwilling to take your cat out on a lead or train it properly at all then you need to keep it indoors.
sick of the entitlement

Why is it nasty or arrogant to point out that a young neighbour in obvious distress had knocked for help at a late hour, and OP went out of her way not to help. No empathy for the distress and no care for the person - to the point where she yelled at her DH for offering to go into the garden and look for the cat. No wonder this country is in such a shit state if we can’t have basic empathy for someone else once in a while.

No wonder this country is in such a shit state if we can’t have basic empathy for someone else once in a while

Yes- I feel the same could be said about selfish cat owners who think nothing of disturbing their neighbours sleep and pestering them for ZERO reasons at all

Which doesn’t ring true as she knew it was a neighbour from the back of the house, and confirmed that she was calling to it out of an upstairs window later on. Why does that represent a threat to her family ?