@peaceandquiet said:
I’m surprised a simple matter has received an aggressive response—from two different tenants! Is this normal?
Well, there’s a fair chance that they have compared notes but that doesn’t make any difference to the facts of the matter. Evidence of an abusive response can only work in your favour if you ever go to a tribunal.
Is it also normal to make a polite, factual complaint as part of a standard process; and then the resulting, quite personal hate mail be forwarded to us and all the other stakeholders by the OC?
It’s not normal but it’s not uncommon. Look at it this way, if they were decent and considerate people you would not be making a complaint in the first place. You should be glad that other residents are seeing their hate mail – it doesn’t cast them in a positive light, does it?
Since both tenants now deny the noise, the OC has requested that we record any further incidents for its use as evidence. We have responded that the OC should check the legality of this request and suggested the tenants who might be recorded may need to know about it.
This is one of the great furphies of modern living – that you can’t record the noise of a party in case you record a conversation. Privacy laws relating to recording devices basically say you can’t record someone’s conversation without their knowledge (NB the key word is ‘knowledge’ not ‘permission’).
If you tell someone you are going to record their conversation and they say they don’t want you to but keep talking and you are clearly still recording, that’s their problem, not yours.
So, if you think you are going to have to take this further, you send them a letter saying that you have been asked to recorded excessive noise in your unit and if they are talking so loudly that they can be recorded in your unit, then they should be aware of that.
There has been no further unreasonable noise since the second complaint.
What now?
What do you want? You have complained, they have vented, but the noise has stopped. There’s nothing you can do about future noise except to get a noise abatement order at your local court and you are a long way off that.
Enjoy the peace and quiet.