Nosey Neighbors

You know that stereotype of the old woman who knows what's going on with everyone in the neighborhood because she sits by her window watching everyone go about their lives? Well, our neighborhood is full of people like that. It's hard to get away with anything. Listen to what happened today....

Necessary background knowledge: We live in a townhouse in a neighborhood with strict (often over the top) HOA restrictions. Any change to the outside of the house must be approved by the architectural committee and the board. So here's the story.....

We are looking into replacing the windows in our house, so we had a guy from a local company come this morning to give us an estimate. Less than a half hour after he left, our phone rang. Here's the conversation:

Man: Hi, this is John, the head of the architectural committee. Are you looking into getting new windows?
Me: Yes (confused as to how he knows this, but thinking that my husband was on the ball and called him to ask what we needed to do to get the windows approved).
Man: Well, I'll drop by the application you need to fill out to get them approved.

I hung up and thanked my husband for being so quick to look into this. He was confused and informed me that he had not called anyone about the windows. Hmmm....I wonder how they knew? Then the thought crossed my mind... Could someone really have seen the service van parked in the parking lot (which is a good little walk from our front door), watched to see which house he went to, and then called John to let him know that we had a window man at our house? All in less than a half hour after he left? No way....it seemed too unbelievable to be true.

So John came to the door later this afternoon and gave us the paperwork. I asked him how he knew we were looking into new windows. "Someone told me," was his answer. "I have spies," he added with a chuckle.

Can you believe it?? What I want to know is how could our house have been robbed with no one seeing anything, but we can't even have a window installer come without it being the big news of the day?