|
|
|
going out of one's way for conflict
Wednesday, March 27 2002
I got a phone call this morning from Ernie, the guy on the fourth floor who gets his broadband for free via an ethernet cable snaking up the back wall of the brownstone. He wanted to know what had happened to his free internet. Normally the light on his ethernet adapter would be blinking, but even that had stopped. Something was amiss.
So I went down into the basement batcave to see what had become of Ernie's connection to my network. I found the problem immediately. Someone had unplugged my batcave computer from its extension cord and even gone on to unplug every single ethernet cable that had been plugged into the hub. Who had done such a thing? The telephone company? Jane, the paranoid (and vaguely deformed) neighbor on the second floor, the resident Gretchen had cautioned me was most likely to go postal?
As I was hooking everything back together and fashioning a little "Dear anonymous saboteur: Please do not disturb my equipment" sign, one of the residents, May, came down the stairs. May is the official housekeeper of the co-op and receives a 150 dollar monthly deduction from her co-op dues because of this. She saw me off in my little batcave and came over, demanding to know if I lived with Gretchen. I said that yes I do. "You know this area is only for storage," she pointed out. "Yes," I agreed, "but nobody cares." "It's in the house rules. You can only use the basement for storage. You cannot have an office here," she explained. "It's not an office. It's just a place I can go when Gretchen needs some time alone. But the point is, nobody cares. Do you care?" "No, I don't care, but it's in the house rules. You cannot have an office here." "It's not an office. I can choose to store my stuff any way I want in my storage area." "Yes, but you can't have an office. Only for storage." "Look, why are you crazy and buggin' when the important thing to note is that nobody cares. You don't even care." "It's in the house rules. You can't have an office. But okay. I will talk to Gretchen." "Fine." "And I will take it up at the board meeting." "You just do that then," I hissed as she walked away.
I'm not the only person to cross paths with May. Lately she has been embroiled in a heated battle with a new tenant named Susan over a patch of choice storage real estate beneath the basement stairway, and now evidently she has decided to add yet another front to her jihad for no reason but the sanctity of the house rules. If history has any lessons to teach, the most important is probably "never fight two battles when you can get by with fighting just one."
Thinking about this altercation in its immediate aftermath, I found myself growing angrier and angrier. What business did May have for poking around in my storage area? What kind of crazy person would meticulously unplug all the cables from a network hub in defense of house rules? Dan Re!tmans, it seems, are everywhere! It was too late, but I thought of a snappy thing I should have said to May during our conversation, "Show me where your storage area is so I can poke around in it and see if you're conforming to house rules."
In hopes of circulating my side of the story before any future co-op board meeting (which I can't attend anyway, since I'm not a co-op member), I posted a note on the front bulletin board addressed to "Whoever has been poking around in my storage area, unplugging things that do not belong to you" saying simply, "Please stop, and respect my stuff."
When Gretchen came home, she said she thought that the note was overly-snippy and somewhat politically counterproductive, so she took it down. We decided to act as though the incident had never happened. After all, what can May do when she comes across me working in the bat cave, call the police? The truth is, nobody cares.
The evening was spent at a seder hosted by the parents of David the Rabbi, with David presiding. By some miracle, this was the first seder I'd ever attended.
I'd made the mistake of not eating beforehand, even though Gretchen had warned me about what to expect. What with all the talking, all the singing, all the discussion, all the polite family-oriented restraint with the wine, by the time the matzos came out, the stuff was like manna from Jewish Heaven. Throughout the seder, I did my best to act like I was enjoying myself, but for the most part it was it was pure torture.
The most interesting observation of the evening concerned the Haggadah, the seder playbook. Haggadahs come in many flavors, from the semi-ecumenical to the hardcore "we must rebuild the Temple and once again sacrifice lambs" zionist. Reportedly there's also a Maxwell House Haggadah featuring a big Maxwell House advertisement on the back; it was created as a marketing gimmick to convince Jews that coffee was indeed acceptable for Passover (not chametz).
Perhaps because of the low-grade suffering I'd experienced throughout the seder, I felt a weird elation when it was all over and we were finally walking back home. By the time we'd made it to the matzos section of Key Foods, I found ideas for eating different preparations of matzos cause for excitement. "Look, they even have dried apricots with the matzos," Gretchen observed. Earlier she'd been telling me about how the eating of Passover foods leads directly to constipation.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020327 feedback
previous | next |
