RL crap

[lierdumoa]

I feel like last semester was the last remaining great semester for my co-op before it lost all it's personality. I feel like people in the co-op don't know each other as well as they did last semester or care about the community. I feel like people don't give a shit about making sure the co-op is not a hole.

I have a two hour Sunday morning pot washing shift. Everyone who lives here has to put in five hours of workshift a week because we're student run and therefore don't have paid workers coming in to clean after us. Sunday morning is by far the worst pot washing shift of the week because Friday night and Saturday pot washing shifts are sign-up instead of assigned. This is most people's least favorite shift, so people hardly ever sign themselves up.

More than this, I get the sense that a lot of the other pot washers don't know how to do their job properly. They don't know to put their pots away after they've washed them. It's not enough to leave them out to dry, especially if you're leaving them out to dry Friday afternoon, because then no one puts them away Friday night, and over the course of the next day dirty pots get mixed in with the clean pots and the clean pots get dirty again without ever having been used.

Now, the problem of dirty pots getting piled up on clean pots wouldn't be a problem if only people would put their dirty pots on top of other dirty pots.

There's also the issue of people dumping dirty pots in the rinse sink. The rinse sink is only for rinsing. It has no disposal. Once a pot goes in there, the pot is already clean. Typically I'll end up spending fifteen minutes I could be spending washing pots cleaning out the rinse sink. Once I spent a full half hour with a plunger getting rice grains out of the drain because some idiot couldn't read the sixteen signs written in big black marker on the wall screaming, "Don't put dirty pots in this sink!!! It has no disposal!!!"

Dishes and pots are probably the two least liked workshifts. I get the strong sense that people who have never done either of these shifts think their dishes and pots appear before them purely by magic and have no concept of what could be making my job harder or easier. I know for a fact that more people are skipping out on their dishes and pots workshifts than ever before. I walk in monday night to find a mountain of pots that should have been gone by the night before.

People see me washing the pots and they see the mountain standing next to me and they thank me. I don't think anyone should thank me for doing my job. I do sometimes think that I should cuss out the guy who was supposed to go before me for not doing his.

Now my bedroom? Is a complete hole. But somehow my inhuman tolerance for clutter does not translate to a tolerance for filth. There is no mess more disgusting and smelly and vile than food mess, except perhaps toilet mess, which, when you think about it, is just another type of food mess. People are just plain disgusting as they have never been prior to this semester. If you're buttering your bread, for the love of God, don't wipe your knife off on the table edge. Someone's going to have to clean that up, and the person who does is going to hate you. I'm continually amazed at the people who will drop an egg on the floor accidentally and leave it there for someone else to clean up. The people who will *break glass* and leave it, conveniently forgetting that a good number of people who live here tend to walk around barefoot.

Now there was a party at my co-op last night and I ended up, amidst dancing and getting drunk and dancing more and in general having a great time, cleaning up someone's broken glass and yelling at someone else for spraying one of those cans of whipped cream into the air, so that it could fall on the floor, so that it could make a lovely sticky mess for some poor sob to clean up. That I could understand. They were not from my co-op. This is not their home. They have no reason to give a shit.

But they people who live here? They should give a shit. Because this is our home and I'm so tired of watching our home fall apart.

Comments

[tclark1922.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time I lived in a co-op (during my last years as an undergraduate and my first year as a grad student). I loved my experiences there. It was here that I finally had those friendship experiences everyone told me I was supposed to have in college. I will always remember the time as the best, except for the crap you're talking about. We had meetings every month and it seemed like each month the "president" would exhort everyone to do their job as assigned. We were lucky that most of us loved living there so we followed through w/ our obligations. Unfortunately, there is still the few that don't and sometimes they make the experience of living in a co-op less than fulfilling.

I hope things get better for you.

Peace
TK

[thistle90.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear things are so frustrating. Are the co-op members on an email list? It might be worth it to send an edited version of this post out to them because it definitely seems to be time for a wake up call.