‘My baby gets woken at 1am by neighbour’s late night takeaways – but drivers blame me’

If you live in a flat you probably get buzzed for the most random of reasons – but one woman has reached the end of her tether and is deciding to take action

If you live in a block of flats or apartments, the likelihood is that you’ve been buzzed a few times when a delivery isn’t actually meant for you. It can be really frustrating, especially if you’re busy or have a lot of flights of stairs to run down to accept the delivery, only for it to be a parcel that isn’t even for you. It can get even more frustrating when your doorbell is going off in the middle of the night.

That’s why one frustrated woman took to Mumsnet, to complain that delivery drivers were not checking which flat they were delivering to before buzzing hers. The mum says she is ‘at the end of her patience’ when it comes to accepting deliveries for her neighbours.

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She wrote: “I’m at a loss and definitely at the end of my patience here. just wanted to share to see if it would annoy you all too.

“I’m honestly (promise!!!) not a stroppy person. I don’t send food back in restaurants and things like that. I don’t complain for small reasons, life’s too short. But we’ve been renting our current place for almost a year and this is driving me nuts.

“Without revealing our real address let’s say we live at 7 Big Hippo Road. It’s a very big new build development with hundreds of apartments and so luck would have it we live in apartment 7B. For some unknown reason it’s a huge ordeal for people to type out Big Hippo road and EVERY single day, several times a day we get deliveries for basically anywhere in the building addressed to 7 B Hippo Road (usually the apartment number is like on the next line and delivery drivers are just careless). When I say every day; I mean every single day. And, more annoyingly, night too (late night pizzas, etc).

“We have an intercom downstairs so first, they ring the intercom which even at its lowest setting is fairly loud (can’t turn it off as we also get deliveries quite often, most of our household essentials are on monthly order with Amazon). I have a one-month-old and a two-year-old. When I was pregnant sleep was very hard to come by. My two-year-old wakes up at 6 am every day. The only time I could nap was when she napped, and if I got woken up it was so so hard to fall asleep again. Cute the motherf****** deliveries that aren’t for us. I get 15 minutes sleep, get woken up, can’t fall asleep again.

“Even worse, then someone orders a pizza or Chinese at 1 am. We ALL get woken up. Imagine having a toddler and newborn woken up in the middle of the night, I’ve literally shed tears over this, it’s exhausting and just such an unnecessary hardship.

“Obviously also now our one-month-old especially gets woken up by the doorbells and some of them also talk really loud. We can mute the intercom overnight but we forget to do it a lot of the time, or then forget to unmute it and end up missing our own deliveries.

“So I started being very mean to delivery drivers. I can’t help it I literally started to hate them. They ARGUE WITH ME. I used to say: it’s not for me, show me what the address says, and point out where the flat number is written down. They would get annoyed, and say it says 7B! And I’m like: do you think I ordered food, paid for it, and now decided I don’t want it anymore? Or do you think I did this ASOS shop and then decided I can’t be asked and not to receive it? I don’t get it why are they fighting with me?

“So now I literally just tell them off and talk to them like they’re toddlers and tell them they have one job and they suck at it etc and honestly that’s just not the person I like to be. It’s kind of satisfying in the moment but long term it’s definitely negativity I could live without.

“If anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate them. Maybe I can take this to the concierge and tell them to screen everyone coming in, but I just dont think it’s possible. Mind you when my cat died on the same day my baby was born, I ran out in my socks to get him to the emergency vet and came home without him, devastated, not even recovered from the absolute terror that my labour was and the little f***** at the concierge desk decided to ask me if I live there. I get it I’m a barefoot mess but if you can screen me, screen the delivery drivers too I guess? Just such an annoying situation!”

People were insistent that the woman should definitely speak to the concierge in the building to try and resolve the issue.

One wrote: “Yes speak to the concierge!”

Another sympathised, writing: “This would drive me absolutely batty. I fully get your rage. However…I don’t understand why you don’t do the thing in this that you can control which is to get better at muting your intercom at night.

“You can’t stop your neighbours putting your address and you can’t stop delivery drivers trying to deliver it to you but you can stop it disturbing you at inconvenient times.”

Another recommended renaming the flat if it was possible, commenting: “Can you give your flat a name? RHINO APT. 7B 7 Big Hippo road.”

One said: “To be honest, I would mute your bell and stop ordering online. Or only order once a month/week from a supermarket so you would know the time slot for delivery and unmute it for just those two hours.”

Others had been through the exact same situation, commenting: “Oh this used to happen in my old flat, drove me mad. They’d buzz me even when it wasn’t for me. Sometimes it was the neighbours buzzing to get in as they didn’t have a key for whatever reason! The buzzer was so f****** loud too.”

What would you do in this situation? Let us know in the comments.