Shari Gab

The last time I was robbed, my laptop was under my bed, my back-up hard drive was stuffed in a kitchen drawer, and my Chanel barettes were slumming it among the pennies in a coin jar.

But everything still managed to walk out the door in the hands of the perpetrator who hit my home while I was at work on a Tuesday afternoon.

From that point on, I began hiding valuables in such obscure places that I still couldn't tell you where my grandmother's tennis bracelet is -- but I know it's in this apartment somewhere.

The nicest thing my neighbor ever did was lie to me -- so I wouldn't fall and die.

It was my upstairs neighbor, and I was certain he was a drug dealer.

He vacuumed four or five times a day and at all hours -- 1 p.m., 8 a.m., 4 a.m.   I imagined some 80-pound woman cutting the powdery product, while a paranoid, pale, tattooed greaseball religiously ran the Hoover to dispense of any evidence.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend thought our apartment was haunted.

"No," I told him, with water-is-wet mater-of-factness. 

When it comes to rentals, a live-in super is one thing (usually a very good thing, depending on the super) – but what about a live-in landlord?

The biggest advantage of sharing a roof with your landlord is that things have more of a tendency to get done...yesterday. Also, he or she may have an expansive sense of personal responsibility.

"Everything gets taken care of," one tenant told BrickUnderground about her in-house landlady.  "She clears the stairs in the winter, has trash cans all ready out on the curb for pick-up and fixes things quickly."

A few weeks ago, Upper West Side co-op dweller Paul Zweben had had enough:  The former chef still couldn't use the $5,000 Viking stove he bought last fall from P.C. Richards. The appliance had been rendered useless by a cracked gas valve.

Reading through the comments about our Noisy Sexy Neighbor Survey  on Gothamist ("Thin Walls No Match for Fornicating"), we stumbled across this discussion about the passive-aggressive use of wifi handles by apartment dwellers:

“I update my wireless network SSID like most people update their Facebook page,” explains one commenter.