The Rooming Game...

One of the staples of life here at ZBT is the semiannual room selection process known as The Rooming Game. The title actually makes it sound a bit more exciting than it actually is, given that there really isn't much "game" involved at any point in the process. The president assigns rooming priority to members of the three classes living in the house, and then rooms are selected starting at the top of the senior class priority, and work their way down. I suppose that the only portion of it which might remotely be considered a "game" is that, in quite a few instances, the rooming game will be re-run if a brother decides to move back into the house after being gone from MIT, or somebody has to move out. In this case, if you know the person who is causing the rooming game to need to be re-run, it might be to your advantage to choose either a given room, or a given set of roommates, knowing that, in the future, the game will be re-run, and that your priority might change. Unfortunately, however, it seems that when the rooming game does get re-run, everybody invariably ends up with what they consider to be a worse room than what they started with.

Then, of course, comes the actual move-in process. For the fall term, this might not be so bad, as the brothers who have stayed here over the summer have probably already moved into their new rooms, so the returning brothers need only to get their stuff out of one of the storage rooms, and move into whichever room their in. For the winter term, however, things get difficult, as everybody is already living here, so there are usually no empty spots with which to start the moving process. This ends up making things fairly hectic right near the start of term, as everybody is trying to move at the same time, usually right before workweek, causing the house to be a bigger mess than it already is.

Sort of a pointless post, I suppose, but my hope is that it'll get me writing in this more often.

posted by Fred Gay @ 21:31