The best part of Brooklyn? It’s near New York City.
Partner & I trained for 48 minutes each way to an event in Brooklyn.
The event: four fifteen-minute talks plus Q&A, starting at 5pm since we had to vacate the space ahead of a different event starting at 6:30pm.
Partner & I arrived at 4:40. One of the organizers said, “You guys are early. Could you come back in 20 minutes?”[1]
If you’re going to have four fifteen-minute talks, plus Q&A time, you really want to start near 5pm. See, I don’t know what they teach you in Brooklyn. But here in Manhattan, 4 x 15minute = 60 minutes. And 60 minutes = an hour.
Instead, they didn’t start until 5:20pm because, as they said, “Some people are coming from work.”
No duh. It’s Thursday. How did you not consider this?
So the talks got squished to 10mins each. And the Q&A got squished to one chunk of ~8 minutes.
And only two people put their shoes in the little cabinet despite the cabinet being labeled “put your shoes in this cabinet”. And yes, they were Me & Partner.
—
The talks were on living in communal spaces. Partner and I are interested in living with friends. We want to raise a family alongside other families, ideally in the same apartment or neighboring.
But, for us this trait is only one of our interests. For the people at this presentation, co-living is the main part of their identity.
One of the recommended processes for co-living: have a roommate check-in. Include open dialogue so different housemates can share their problems.
My problem: a poorly scheduled, structured, and run event.
[1] Partner says they said, “You guys are incredibly early.” I didn’t hear the incredibly.
Julian Wise 