Land of the Gray
(Photo: ell brown)
There’s a joke that is going around for quite some time now in Serbia. “Who needs hooligans when you have elderly citizens?” If you’ve seen Polanksy’s Tenant, you get the idea. Recently, I’ve been subject of a complaint filed by one of our neighbors. It was something about water dripping down from one of the drainage holes on our balcony (yes, drainage, something that is supposed to, well… drain liquid, right?) down to neighbor’s balcony’s extension he built for himself.
In Serbia (and elsewhere, no doubt), elderly neighbors have historically been a pain in the ass to their younger counterparts. They complain just about everything. From kids making some healthy noise in the evening to water dripping from the drainage, to toys kids may throw off balcony. Anything that comes from your flat out into the area outside the flat is a potential threat to the elderly.
The very first thing the complaining neighbor told me when I was moving in was “Please do not throw dirty water out from your balcony after you wash your dishes.” I mean, come on, who does these things anyway? Who would be crazy enough to walk all the way from one end of the flat where the kitchen is, to the balcony, to throw out liters of dirty water? Sounds crazy right? A few liters of water in a metal pot is not exactly light. But there goes my neighbor, worrying about this threat.
As if crazy elderly people knocking on your door every week isn’t enough, some new legislation has been passed that permits these folks to file a complain about most of these crazy threats. People with cheap digicams come over to your place, they shoot stuff for the record, and they take your details, and go on their merry way. And then you receive a letter informing you of the ludicrous sums you have to pay for your mischiefs.
If you put two and two together, this is actually a perfect way for the government to make money off young people’s misery. And make us feel even more miserable. The gray plague has taken over this country, and the demography is rapidly shifting in favor of the elderly. But the government likes it, because the majority of voters will soon be the very senior citizens that they support. The grays must feel like their voice has finally been herd, and they might appreciate it just enough to vote for the ones that allowed this to come true. And again, it makes a lot of money by collecting ludicrous fines, right?
Who wants to live in this shithole of a country that allows senior citizens to bully the young, except senior citizens, right? So a lot of young people will probably figure out the bad situation they’re in (as I already have), and just go away. No self-respecting youngster would wanna put up with it (and thank god I have very little self-respect because I don’t have the resources to move out just yet).
So am I being unreasonable? Should we just allow people to throw water out of their balcony as much as they like? Of course not. But the drainage problem is not something that is solved this way. It’s solved by introducing standards for drainage system. For example, balcony drainage must get the water away from walls, or something. I’m sure there are plenty of ways to do this. For example, the roof’s drainage pipe is just next to our balcony. Was it so hard to connect the balcony’s drainage to that pipe? I don’t think so. But yeah, I guess such laws don’t make the majority seniors any happier (because they won’t have anything to complain about), and they certainly don’t make any money because there’d be nobody to pay the fines. So we end up being all Trelkowski-like.
