Dear Management: I need to report my neighbor
You are not the first person to call about the smell.
For eighteen years Kayla Stone has been the community manager on the other end of the phone - the one who receives the noise logs with emotional impact ratings, mediates the parking feuds that outlast marriages, processes the emotional support animal paperwork of increasingly creative variety, and maintains a filing cabinet with a bottom drawer labeled MISCELLANEOUS that she is not ready to discuss.
In Dear Management: I Need to Report My Neighbor, Stone opens that drawer.
What spills out is eighteen years of the funniest, strangest, most human complaints ever filed - and the surprising truths they reveal about the people making them. A woman who rates the emotional impact of a coffee mug placed on a counter at an eight out of ten. A man who engineered his car to resist towing. A resident who gathered their neighbor's dog's waste and left it on their porch - a man in an orange hoodie was seen in the vicinity and was never identified. A board member who threatened to sue for defamation when Stone said the word bullying. And one trash collector who found half a goat in the community bin and asked, very politely, if they could keep it.
The answer was yes. Some decisions make themselves.
But underneath every ridiculous complaint is something Stone took years to fully understand: people are never really fighting about the parking space. They are fighting about whether anyone is listening. Whether they matter. Whether their small patch of shared space in the world belongs to them at all.
Dear Management is laugh-out-loud funny. It is also - quietly, honestly, in the way the best humor writing always is - about loneliness, community, professional integrity, and what it means to keep showing up when showing up is the hardest thing you have ever done.
This book is dedicated to Amanda. She would have loved every page of it.
Please direct all complaints in writing.
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