
Love, love, love this idea.
One of Slate’s latest podcasts featured a discussion regarding a letter addressed to Dear Prudence. The woman writing the letter moved into a new place and found that her upstairs neighbor was often having loud, racous sex. Soon after, when the new neighbor was connecting to her Wi-Fi, she noticed that another building member had changed their Wi-Fi to a new setting: We can all hear you having sex.
The woman writing the initial asked was questioning whether or not this was a great idea in this specific instance and the Slate podcasters were discussing whether or not changing Wi-Fi names was a good passive-aggressive way to let your neighbors know what you are thinking.
Both of the podcasters agreed that the not-so-subtle way of changing the Wi-Fi might be less embarrassing for all of the people involved. You wouldn’t necessarily want to complain directly about a couple’s loud sex life because you both would think about it every time you met in the elevator from then on forward. So, in this particular instance the passive aggressive method would definitely work out best.
I’ve had loud neighbors in the past, but have never even considered the idea of changing my Wi-Fi setting just to annoy them. And I don’t know if the new Wi-Fi name would even change the behavior. If I saw something like that, I might just consider having even louder sex. I mean, should passive-aggressive behavior like this be rewarded or is it really just a smart way of getting your point across without having to face the (guilty) parties.
What do you think? Whenever I’ve had neighbors having sex loudly in my vicinity, I’ve ignored it and put a pillow over my head--halfway thinking that maybe at some point I might be the one having noisy sex. Of course, when there are obvious theatrics involved because the woman has watched far too many pornos for her sexual education (ie. she believes that an orgasm is not an orgasm unless is it clearly audible in a five-mile radius), then the problem becomes worse.
In the case of a loud, fake orgasm from a neighbor, should the Wi-Fi name be changed to: We can all hear your fake orgasms?
Or would that be a bit too much? I’m not sure, but I’m definitely keeping the change the Wi-Fi strategy on the table as an option should my neighbors get a little too noisy. The ironic thing is that I listened to the podcast with my windows open, so there is a 47% chance that my neighbor actually heard the podcast. I hope he didn’t think I was talking about him:)

