These Germans

I know an English journalist living in Bonn who was phoned at work by his landlady and instructed to come home and take his washing down from the line and rehang it in a more systematic manner. He told her, in so many words, to go fuck herself, but every time he put washing out after that he would return home to find it had all been taken down and rehung. The same man came in one weekend from cutting the grass to find an anonymous note on the doormat informing him that it was illegal to mow one's lawn in North Rhineland-Westphalia between noon on Saturday and 9am on Monday, and that any further infractions would be reported to the lawnmower police or whatever.