Who is the boss? Who
do we respect? Who enforces rules that
need to be kept?
It is comforting; knowing one’s place in the world was, who
the superiors are and who we are responsible for.
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| They all Know the Pecking Order |
In my life growing up I always knew the pecking order. I was usually somewhere between my parents
and the family chickens (who also knew the pecking order). At school I deferred to authority and in
scouting and other leadership opportunities I expected people to defer to my
authority (in whatever position that I got).
Even at work there was some sort of chain of command, someone who was in
charge of telling people off if they were misbehaving. Then I came to college.
There are a list of factors that contribute to the lack of
order and organization in the college dorm.
I think that the biggest reason is that there are no elections nor divinely
appointed “apartment leaders.”
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| Men's College Dorm |
At the beginning of the semester one of my roommates had a
young lady over a few minutes past curfew. I wanted to obey all of the BYU living
standards to keep my ecclesiastical endorsement at BYU in good conscience. But, I didn’t feel like I had the authority
to call them out on the spot. I had only
seen my RA’s once or twice since moving here, and I felt the apartment manager
prefers to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing. So not being in charge, nor having someone in
charge to turn to meant that if I wanted to have peace of mind, I would have to
accept all the responsibility for being a jerk.
I stewed over the situation in frustration and finally built
up the courage to say something about it to my roommates, and they just laughed
and assured me that they wouldn’t be much longer. To them life was great, to me lawlessness
ruled.
I feel like I am going through this right now. I got into a sticky situation with housing so I had to move in with some "randoms" and its been interesting. Great guys, but extremely messy, and I was the ONLY one to take out the trash in the month of january. So in order to instill some fairness and order I have now made a trash chart to make sure I'm no longer acting as our apartment "maid". I think in these situations (as I was an RA myself) what you have to do is serve them first, then set the rules. Showing that you care is important before jumping and and trying to be "the boss", or at least thats what they might think your doing.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to know that guys struggle with this too! Being a girl, there is always one roommate who becomes the mother of the apartment in a sense who feels responsible for establishing the order and such. I thought it was a girl thing though. Order is such a natural thing I guess though. As much as we'd like to say it's possible for there to be order without leadership, we naturally crave it as humans. There will always be a pecking order in my opinion. It's just nature if you ask me.
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