When you start writing about the petty and often absurd Toronto neighbourhood complaints that bubble up into headlines, people start sending you news items.

No sooner have you confronted the menace to character and property values posed by splash pads and half-million-dollar homes than your inbox fills up with requests to administer smackdowns.

A couple in Bloor West Village can’t stand the sight of a hydro pole!

Some people in Markham who live next to a graveyard fear a new four-storey mausoleum will cast them into the — Duh-duh-DUUUUH — “shadow of death”!

Out on Ossington they are confronting the scourge of “vertical-split duplexes!”

I apologize, but a columnist just cannot keep up with the volume of press releases demanding that a city-wide issue be made out of each cap left off the toothpaste and every wrong fork used during the salad course.

But when a politician does make something a city-wide issue, one sits up and takes notice, which is what happened this week when Councillor Paula Fletcher (open Paula Fletcher's policard) attempted to add an emergency last-minute motion to the city council agenda. “I need everybody’s attention at city hall — I need them to make this a priority and fix this,” Fletcher said.

And at first it seemed that, hey, this might be actually interesting. Her motion addressed an allowed industrial use on a laneway that is also residential. In a city that is trying to preserve industrial uses in densifying and gentrifying residential areas, in order to protect and diversify the municipal employment base, this is a topic that might present interesting obstacles.

What happens when Ye Olde Jackhammery down the block adds a night shift? When the pillow-fluffing plant across the way branches out its operations to add an alarm-clock testing division? When some beardo in suspenders decides to try his hand at authentic artisanal iron smelting in the old garage up the street?

As someone who peacefully shares his back lane with factories — and who once lived a few doors down from the Brunswick House on Bloor Street’s pukin’-and-dukin’ frat boy row — I can’t say I’m intrinsically sympathetic to the complaints of those who buy a house next to an industrial site and then find themselves intolerant of all the industry taking place.

Still, the topic does seem to present novel and possibly nuanced areas of urban conflict a growing city ought to carefully consider.

But no. The complaint at hand was not dealing with issues of pollution or shipping traffic or midnight shift gear-grinding. It was more of retail complaint than an industrial one, and it boiled down to one of your more typical and rudimentary of urban annoyances: the sound of people having fun.

It seems that some neighbours were complaining about Left Field Brewery’s tasting room on the lane along the railroad tracks. The budding craft beer company has had its door open to the public since earlier this spring, serving 12-ounce glasses of suds to walk-in customers who might also buy a case to take home.

The place is open only from noon to 9 p.m. And since the brewery is a working manufacturer, and air-conditioning such an industrial space is impractical, they keep their garage door open.

The gist of the complaint, now comprehensively detailed by the Star, Sun, National Post, CBC and Global news, is that the customers talk. Sometimes they talk loudly. One imagines, beer in hand, they may even occasionally laugh or burst into song.

And…? Well, and nothing. That’s it. The customers talk. Mostly on summer weekend afternoons and evenings.

The Brewery protests that it has tried very hard to be a good, accommodating neighbour, and even those bringing complaints to city council for debate acknowledge this is the case. “We want their business to succeed,” Giovanni Pittalis, the local artist who started the petition against the carousing, told the National Post. “Whenever we call to ask them to turn their music down, they do. They’re great people, we just want a compromise.”

Even in a city where small-ball whining can sometimes seem a way of life — where street festivals are sometimes thought to be a problem to be managed, and those hosting the Pan Am Games keyed in their marketing message on “Let’s get rrrrrready! To! Sit in Trrrrrrrrrraffic!” — this seems a bit much.

Perhaps we might all consider that there is no problem here in need of solving. Summer days are made for talking and laughing over a beer — in backyards and on lakefront decks across the province, that is the sound of a July day well spent.

It must be tough to be the kind of person so sensitive to noise that such a common and widely appreciated sound is difficult to tolerate. I don’t mean to wave off their annoyance as fictional — I understand that they are genuinely bothered by the sound. It is a real complaint, it is just not a reasonable complaint.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Because that is life: learning to understand that our own annoyance at the evidence of the existence of other people is often our problem, not theirs. Especially in a big city, where being crowded near other people who are different from us — who live different lifestyles and enjoy different pursuits and, yes, even often annoy us just by doing the perfectly ordinary and expected things they like to do — is the most basic part of getting along.

Sometimes what you do is adjust your own behaviour— buying earplugs or changing your work schedule, say — rather than insisting on making a big complaint. You grin and bear it, and do not add to the noise issues with your own kvetching.

What we have here is a failure to not communicate. It’s an all too common problem in Toronto.