The neighbour's telly

Here's a science question, possibly.

If our telly is on, I can blank it out without effort, and go to sleep easily on the sofa. The telly could be blasting. It doesn't matter. It has exactly zero effect on me.

If I hear the neighbour's telly through the wall, because she is a deaf old lady and has the telly blasting, in our house it is quiet. So quiet you can't make out the words being spoken, and you can only hear a murmur on the loud bits. It doesn't bother wife but it drives me crazy.

Anyone know why this might be so?

 

id feel like the neighbour was being disrespectful by having the TV so loud. even though she's deaf I'm sure there will be some device so she doesn't have to have the TV blasting.

 

Tone deafness is a good'un, what you can hear and what you can't hear

 

I think the answer is control!!! You can turn off your telly anytime you want but you can't turn off your neighbours!!

Val

 

I should also add though, the volume of the old lady's telly by the time its leaked through our wall is considerably less than the following things that don't bother me:

* The banging and clattering that occasionally happens at the steel works just down the road. A noise which I think is more scrap being loaded into the furnace.
* The 'cracker' going off at the chemical works, which sounds like a low flying jet aircraft when it goes, and makes the whole sky light up
* Traffic going past outside (both pedestrian and vehicular)

All of the above is considerably louder than the telly leakage, they're all outside of my control, and yet none of them bother me.

It can't even be a disrespect thing, because surely it is equally disrespectful to modify your car exhaust to make it more noisy and then used that car at night, or have a loud drunken conversation while walking down the street late at night, but these things don't bother me (as long as its not actual shouting).

I think I've heard the telly once when in a bad mood about something unrelated, latched onto it, and now its programmed itself in so that totally against my will, I actually listen for it and find myself preparing to be annoyed by it.

 

Why does my missus still elbow me in the ribs then when I snore

 

Maybe she doesn't realise *quite* how deaf she is? My understanding is, if it's age related, that it creeps up on you.
Perhaps, she isn't aware of the newer technologies that exist which would enhance her hearing capacity when watching TV? Maybe she doesn't have anyone who is able to offer her that knowledge/advice?

I doubt very much that she is being intentionally "disrespectful"? Certainly not something I would immediately attribute to someone of her generation.

 

no I wouldn't of said that the old woman was being purposely disrespectful. And I do see your point about the creeping up on you thing and also not knowing bout the technology. it would still annoy me though.

 

When I lived at my parents house it was right under the approach path for airplanes coming into Manchester Airport, visitors often said how can you live with the noise from the planes and the A556 which was just 50 yards away, truth was we'd lived there that long we'd got used to it and never really noticed it

 

Possibly me too But the whole point about living in a community (surely?) is an ability to see things from another's point of view; a dash of tolerance and the ability to put it all into perspective?

So, while it would irritate me (possibly) at times, I'd be weighing up my occasional irritability vs her permanent frustration - which she much surely encounter on a daily basis when she converses with people (shops, Dr's, meter men, postmen, etc) ... after all, *they* don't even have a volume button she has any control over

Thank you for understanding my point, Allan

 

She is a lovely old stick, and I have no doubt at all that she has no intention of upsetting anyone. She knows its too loud. Her daughter told her apparently, and she (the old lady) asked me about it. At the time it didn't bother me, and I said so, but it got louder since. I put a polite note through her door about it. I would have spoke to her face to face but for an old woman, she is surprisingly active its difficult to catch her in, except at night, and I'm not going to frighten an old lady living on her own by banging on the door at night. Since the note, she turned it down, but its crept back up again.

The thing is, we occasionally hear her coughing and spluttering (she is an old smoker). That is louder than her telly, which can only mean that the walls simply don't block enough sound. It can't be disrespectfully loud, it must just be that the walls are too thin. Asking her to turn it down further would be like asking her not to watch her own telly in her own house, so I just have to learn to live with it until I can afford to get some sound impeding cladding to go on the bedroom wall.