“Well, that’s rude.”

Don is having surgery at the same time he is changing rooms.  This creates another complication in the elaborate chess game of commune room assigning.  Typically, members recover from surgery in Nashoba which is designed for convalescence.  So Jim (who lives in the infirmary in Nashoba) is getting bumped out of his room while Don is recovering.  Jim knew this was possible when he moved in and has chosen to stay in the building, even though several “unbumpable” rooms have opened up since he moved in, presumably because Nashoba is quite a nice building to live in and we have perhaps one recovery process a year, so he does not get bumped often,  this may be his first time.

Jim was excited about the prospect of moving into the old room of the member who was having surgery.  He got ready to move down there and then found that a neighbor in that building had decided to move into the room which was being vacated.  Upon hearing this Christina commented “Well, that’s rude.” knowing that Jim had been excited about moving (tho only for the period of recovery) to this room.  Bochie and Aubby quickly countered “No it is not”

Room assigning and room rights are somewhat complex here.  In this case, Jim’s status is that of a guest in the building (despite him being a full member of the community).  The person who wants to move into the room permanently is a member of the building (we call them SLGs for Small Living Group).  The rights of the SLG member supersede the rights of guests in the building, even if they were excited about it.  We choose to have these various control structures and agreement, principally to avoid the lengthy squabbles which we believe would ensue otherwise.

It gets more complex still.  Wren is interested in moving into Ta Chai, the building where most of this shuffling is happening.  If she decides she wants to do a 3 week guesting period in the building, she could bump Jim as well (in this case possibly  completely out of the building).  But they are both guests, right? Why does she have priority?  There are guests and there are guests.  Wren as a guest interested in living permanently in the building has priority over Jim who is just being placed there until his room is free again and could, theoretically at least, be placed in any free room.  Wren is interested in actually living in Ta Chai so her room rights are more important in this case.  In this case Wren will likely wait until the recovery period is over, so Jim can keep his Ta Chai room for a while, because Wren is nice.

So it is not rude actually, it is how we do things culturally around here.