If there’s one thing flatting is bound to accentuate it is the potential for battles to escalate out of control and become all-encompassing wars. The perennial up-down conversation regarding ‘the seat’ being a pertinent example.
To me, anything is preferable to that conversation, it being the one you can never, ever win. Despite being told how things should pan out up-down wise, many blokes will simply refuse to do the right thing by their female residents and leave that exclamation mark where they want. And like the shocked ‘Oh!’ that it is, the seat will return the look it has received in a perpetual affirmation of the laziness of my blokey co-residents.
But then I sometimes think the battle isn’t so much a conflict as a realisation that there isn’t any realisation going on among the guys. Habits are habits after all, and habits form for reasons beyond my ability to explain in a humble blog. More interesting though is resistance to changing these habits, especially when the honourable leader for the flat is in fact a woman.
I can’t help but think that were the leader currently a man, then an appropriate Men’s Caucus would form, and the issue of the seat of exclamation would be resolved, but because of the tendency of blokes to characterise any assertion of power by a woman to be the direct result of a particular rhythmic change, then change is resisted.
That or they may be former flatmates who consider the problem to be ‘too many chicks getting uppity’.
The truth is that our flat, like other flats I’ve seen in operation world-wide, tends to have a little ruling clique, the group of people who have the reigns on the flat account, issue rules and regulations to other flat members, and who like to hold on to their power with a grip approximating that of a fat man on a bacon sandwich.
Consequently, when you get flatmates like our man Pita, who used to have his hands on the flat account a few years back, making lots of wild accusations about the people we’re interviewing as prospective housemates, the flat heads have a number of ways to jump. They can either chuck Pita out of the flat altogether, which would be my preference, he annoys the be-jesus out of me, or they can keep him nice and close in a particularly Machiavellian way.
The thing about Pita is that he’s a particular kind of dickhead. First of all, he’s definitely the kind of bloke to thinks that dropping the exclamation is an infringement on his masculinity, as opposed to admitting that he doesn’t give a stuff either way, and is just forgetful. Second of all, his screaming and yelling about the flat demographic is probably just a last ditch effort to draw attention to himself, as he’s getting waaay to old to continue seducing the girls in the ground floor rooms based on his no-longer-so-boyish good looks.
Fortunately, our flat heads are also wise heads, and realise that Pita isn’t really threatening the flat stability to any great extent. The only one really getting worried is Dan, who’s had his eye on the big room upstairs for months now, and sees it slipping away if the girls take on Pita’s suggestions and add both him and the new flatmates to their clique (room allocation is decided in Committee). But, Dan is secretly American in outlook, so we tend to ignore his self-righteous, Bible-thumping ways.
Good old Pita. I’m sure if him and Dan ever got their act together and took control over the house committee it would be cause for me to move my entire house-load of stuff back to Melbourne. This expat only came home because the political climate where I was living got too much for my conscience. If it means I now have to actively resist a cabal of flat-nazi’s then I’m packing up and moving to another place. Again.
In the meantime though, it will be interesting to see how the flat heads get into action to shut Pita the hell up and minimise his impact on flat too-ings and fro-ings. Despite Dan’s exclamations of ‘gosh darn it to billy-o’ every time he needs to be heard, Pita is the one who’s rocking the boat at the present. I mean, I’d like a bit of diversity on the flat menu. God knows eating pasta every evening is getting old really, really quickly.
And lastly, all that this type of the rocking the boat does is make our flat a less attractive place to live. Prospective housemates see the tussle between Dan and the girls and think, ‘no big deal’, but if Dan and Pita get together? Besides the potential for some very strange, in all likelihood leather-clad, parties to be thrown, no fun for anyone who doesn’t like listening to Shania Twain and eating meat and three veg.
PS. In what for me is the final word on the seat up/down debate, a reader sent me this link. Apparently, leaving the seat up results in the water becoming aerosol... And your toothbrush is in that room.