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?

Your halo is in the post.

ANYWAY, OP. I wish you an uninterrupted night. Do keep us updated!

Got one, thanks. You can keep it.

I have cats, I love cats... I also love sleep. I get annoyed when my own cats decide to lick my face and wake me up at 2am, let alone if a neighbour came knocking to look for a cat that wasn't missing/injured/in any specific danger.
Can't believe that people actually think you are being unreasonable to not be wanting to wake up twice in the night to go looking for a cat, who was just outside being a cat. Hope the naughty cat behaves and you get a good night's sleep tonight!

I’d have been annoyed. And I’d have gone and got her cat. She was really upset, you could have helped her but chose not to.

I feel like she’s bad but you’re worse.

But how do you 'get' a cat that doesn't want to be got? Isn't it perfectly normal for a cat to be out at night enjoying a wander?
Stressful for the owner- yes- but something you have to deal with from time to time if you have cats.

How do you know the cat didn’t want to be got if you didn’t try to get it?

Many years of cat ownership.

If the owner can't manage to get it, how on earth would a stranger? Especially half asleep in the dark?

Also, when would OP be allowed to actually sleep?

Telling someone woken at an ungodly hour to be kind to a madwoman needlessly neurotic about her cat!!!!!!

Cats are nocturnal animals. They wander into other people’s gardens if you let them out of your house.

Your neighbour is a full idiot. I would go round there at 6am and tell her so and say if she ever dares to wake you again for such a stupid stupid reason, you will call the police.

Just reading your post makes me fume. YANBU in any way @greywolfie

Let's face it, @DotAndCarryOne2 and @Didimum know OP's mind and her neighbour's far more than OP does. That must explain their tenacity at showing no empathy for OP and tying themselves in knots trying and failing to prove that she is somehow lying.
Really OP should have just asked them to tell the story from the outset, although she'd probably have had to ring their doorbells at 3:15am to do so. I'm sure they'd have been all helpful and happy for the opportunity.

😆

So much irony in their posts isn't there? They can't see it though. It's quite bizarre. Preaching the #BeKind mantra, whilst being anything but that themselves!

Calling us miserable people hating, stone cold hearted zombies is certainly an interesting choice of compliment!

Unknown woman knocking at 2.30 am with a weird story about her cat? I don’t think my first impulse will be to stay polite and help her. And I love cats.

OP it was great that you wrote her a letter back explaining how cat’s world works. She clearly needed some home truths about cats and how to be a good neighbour.

Ha ha yes! 😆

The owner couldn’t get it because it wasn’t on her property.

OP, I’ve had cats all my life and I have 3 cats now. All 3 come to their name.

It’s not like I think the neighbour is reasonable. Far from it. Like I said, her behaviour is not good. But she was crying on the doorstep at 2.30am. I’d have got the cat.

I might have posted here to say, my batshit neighbour did this AIBU to think she’s batshit? Because it IS batshit. But I’d have got her cat - or tried to - because it clearly meant a lot to her. She’s out at 2.30am, and crying. I’d try to help.

@Bloozie it's a CAT. A CAT. The neighbour's cat managed to get itself onto the OP's property, it could have easily have got itself back to its own house and garden. It didn't need rescuing.

Somehow I had read all of OP's posts but missed the update about 5am and about the letter.

Definitely sounds like the owner who has anxiety and not the cat!

But that's what outdoor cats do so there was no need to disturb anyone or cry about it. I'd help if there was an actual emergency but this wasn't it and crying about it doesn't change that.

Sleeping probably means a lot to her neighbours.

Blagg her - be relieved that it was ONLY the cat that had escaped > NOT the <insert some name
(false widow spider)

>

Has anyone considered that maybe the neighbour’s cat was trying to get away for a reason? Maybe the cat was done with the neighbour’s neuroticism as well.

You’ll be waiting a long time, it was me who mentioned Karma, not @Didimum !! And not in the context of wishing punishment on anyone, or ‘striking OP down’, but simply that generally what goes around comes around.

Neither myself nor this poster have said that the neighbours’ behaviour was reasonable - of course it wasn’t, or that OP had no right to be annoyed - of course she did. I was simply pointing out that the cat is not the issue here. The issue is a young girl so upset as to be in tears in the middle of the night, and OP not being able to see past her own annoyance enough to help.

OP has since posted that she does have empathy and has tried to reach out to the neighbour with a letter, and has also backtracked somewhat on what she said in her first post - in which the anger and frustration are palpable, and understandably so, but that doesn’t change the fact that people coming to the thread and engaging are reacting mainly to that post, which showed no empathy for the girls’ situation at all.

I’m done with this thread. The few posters who have tried to advocate for the neighbour have been jumped on by the majority smug in their healthy ‘me first’ boundaries and some of the comments in reply have bordered on personal insult. This isn’t the first time l’ve hoped that MN isn’t a microcosm of the attitudes of wider society and it probably won’t be the last.

This cat wasn't coming to its name though, was it, it was happily chilling in OPs garden ignoring its owner.

So why would it come to OP if not its owner?

No unless the cat had been missing or is injured its is mad to ring the door bell at that time.

For goodness sake, catch yourself on.

Also pandering to someone being utterly neurotic and ridiculous under the mantra of “be kind” does them no favours, in my humble opinion. She’s clearly overly anxious but pandering it to by going on a fool’s errand searching for a cat in the dark that’s just out on a normal cat nocturnal wander won’t help her the next time she gets overly anxious about something quite commonplace and every day. Sometimes people really do need to learn to sit with a bit of discomfort for a while and see that the world don’t fall in, to help themselves learn to manage that anxiety. Insisting that others rush to help all the time because someone ‘is anxious’ doesn’t help in the long run. What about the next time, and the next time. It’s not a normal reaction on the neighbour’s part, and maybe she should take steps to manage that, rather than all the people insisting this should somehow be the OP’s problem to help with just because she’s crying = so be kind.