Written by

emDesigns

During the day, our upstairs neighbors are radio silent. During the night, however, they are very lively, especially in the room directly above mine. Without fail, at 10:00 pm each night when I am teetering between sleep and consciousness, I am startled fully awake by the sound of the activities with which they occupy themselves. Most of the time, it involves dragging heavy wooden furniture across the ground. Less commonly, they scatter nuts and bolts on the floor. I’ve also heard them practicing what sounds like tap dancing routines. Occasionally, the tap dancing or furniture-scraping will come to a pause and the perpetrators will have loud arguments, obviously pertaining to someone tripping over another person during the dance routine or dropping their end of the piece of furniture. I was musing with curiosity upon this phenomenon this morning and had a sudden revelation—the residents must be Taobao actors. A commonality shared by all Taobao furniture products is the fashion in which their durability and sturdiness is advertised. In the video advertisements, the actors will put the piece of furniture through all sorts of trials and tribulation, including but not limited to dropping it from a great height, running it over with a car, smashing it with a hammer, and having multiple people stand or jump on it. Through all of the painful ordeals, the product will remain amazingly unaffected and the buyer will be thoroughly convinced that the product, being invincible to all possible catastrophes, is a must-buy. The people upstairs, I decided, must be the actors in these advertisements conducting rehearsals at night after their day jobs. Whether my theory is a stroke of genius or the unfortunate consequence of sleep deprivation, none can tell.