Room Crunch

One of my more interesting job is i am the room assigner.  This means i place guests inside hopefully the best place in this huge physical plant we have.  There is some  powerful policy which helps me.  Specifically, if you are gone from the community for more than 3 days, control of your room reverts to me for placing guests there.  This is a highly unimaginable circumstance for most of my comrades in Babylon.

You can imagine “i mean, what about all my stuff?, and the room is a mess and what if they go thru my papers and they might mess up my plants ….”

In the affluent world we have a dozen reasons why our personal space needs to sit idle when we are not in it.  Frankly, communards are some combination of more evolved and poorer.  You can make your room available for someone else.  i have guests in my room fully half the time (far more than anyone else here) and the net is that nice things happen to my room quite regularly and i have never lost anything or had anything damaged.  [And i am an anti-materialist, who does not care much about stuff and might well not notice if something were taken.]  And when the community is at population capacity (aka pop cap) we need to use all the available rooms for our regular flow of guests and family.

We just had a member have a manic breakdown.  They went to the psych ward for a while and then they came back, before they were really down and then they went back to their parents place.  This rooms is mine now, this member will be gone for more than the requisite three days.

But they did not leave me an especially guest-able room.  So i will probably tidy their mess up some to make it more comfortable for a visitor to the community.  I consulted with the manic members care team today – the group which is set up to manage their affairs and relationship with the community while they are recovering.  They said they would check in and see what instructions there were for taking care of the stuff.

Funny complex world this.


you want to talk about personal space ?