I Was Extorted by My 60 Year Old Neighbors for $2000

And they won!

I don’t normally publish full articles on Saturday (don’t worry, I’ll release the weekly free article tomorrow.) But hey—surprise time! I’m working on a new book, similar to Will There Be Free Food? except it’s about the next phase in my life after my San Francisco tech era (late twenties to mid thirties.) Consider this story a preview of that book. And if you like it, you might want to read Will There Be Free Food? given that it’s available on Substack!

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When Nick and I first bought our home four years ago, we got a sense right away that the sellers were kind of nutso. When we decided we wanted to buy it, they had already been struggling to sell it for a while. They were a married couple in their sixties who had been living there since the ‘90s. Nick lowballed them a little, and ultimately they accepted his offer (not under duress, I should add!) We never interacted with them directly, but we had plenty of interaction with their real estate agent, a woman in her fifties who randomly burst into tears once because they were “being mean” to her. We got the sense these were people with whom we did not want to interact.

Just like the beginning of a white Jordan Peele movie, when we moved into the house, we missed one particular detail: the sellers were now inexplicably living across the street from us.

Not only were they living across the street, but the wife of the couple would routinely show up at our front gate, say nothing to us, and proceed to chain smoke. I’ll try to describe her without being mean, but she looked a bit like if Carly Fiorina was an alcoholic. Given that she wasn’t technically on our property, there wasn’t much we could do. Plus, given that we had a baby and no time or mental energy for drama and animosity, we hated the idea of confronting her. This fear was compounded by the fact that we were going to have to live across the street from her indefinitely.

Once we got to know some of our other neighbors (who it turned out, were friends with this couple) we discovered that they were apparently “salty” they didn’t make more money off the sale of their house (without getting into details, they made, uhhh, plenty of money.) While the whole thing was weird, my only concern was escalation. Given my OCD about safety, the last thing I wanted was some kind of psycho, who by default knew where I lived (and the layout of my house) having it in for me or for Nick.

We had other indications that these people were off their tits. For example, when we moved into the house, we discovered this light switch. We were dealing with a couple of certified nutters:

Anyway, we continued to peacefully ignore these people for years. This frosty non-relationship continued as our baby grew into a toddler, and after I had my second baby. It wasn’t until this year—four years after we moved into the house—that we finally heard from them.

Well, I should clarify. We didn’t hear from them—they’re still ignoring us. We heard from their lawyer, and he was demanding we pay them $2,000 within the next seven days, or they would take us to court.