The story behind us being the cause of an apartment-wide nastygram is this:
Some friends of ours had a trapeze swing in their house and it was just the best activity for the kids, inside, in the winter. We realized that there were already fittings for it in our apartment (that had hitherto been a mystery, until we saw what our friends had). We got a free trapeze swing thanks to a Turku freecycle group and Jeremy hung it up in our kitchen, like so.
Oh man the kids had fun on the swing! We were so happy with it. We noticed that due to the way the ceiling fittings connected to the swing, it squeaked sometimes. But it was not at all a loud squeak and it didn't disturb us at all.
After several weeks (possible even a couple of months), someone posted a letter on the common noticeboard and also slipped a note through our mail slot. The letter was very polite and stated that it was not necessarily directed toward a specific apartment, but that for the past few weeks there had been an intermittent squeaking noise coming through the walls/ceilings/floors. This noise disturbed their sleep and irritated their cats. The note posted on the common notice board started getting annotations from other neighbors saying that they'd heard the same noise. Vague guesses about its source were made - people noted a particular floor they thought it was coming from (not our floor).
But I do think it was us - I think it was the trapeze swing squeaking on its hinges, reverberating louder through the building than it did in our apartment! It fit the general description and timing of the noise. We took the swing down until we could find a different kind of fittings for it, which hasn't happened yet, unfortunately. There is still the mystery of why the note thought it was originating from a floor other than ours, and why it would have disturbed someone's sleep if the kids were only using it during the day. But we know the noise stopped after we took the swing down because Jeremy saw the guy who posted it and casually asked him about it.
It was nice that our Finnish neighbors both 1) let us know, kindly and anonymously, that we were the cause of discomfort to others; and 2) let us resolve it our own selves, anonymously. No face lost, no confrontation. Anonymous notes at their best, I suppose.
