Schinckel.net

I was thinking tonight of how we used to live - specifically, how my first share house ‘worked’. There were four of us, originally, living at 81 Alabama Avenue, Prospect. All four had been at school together (to some extent) at Naracoorte. Derek and I had been good mates, and apparently Heath and Bruce had “Gotten on okay.” The best way for us to live together in relative co-operation was to be somewhat competitive. For instance, if you wanted to do a load of washing, you had to do your own. The trick was, if there wasn’t room on the line for your clothes, too bad. That meant that we used to actually get up earlier than expected on weekends to do a load of washing. Of course, Uni was not all day every day, so you would often have time to do a wash during the week. But the rule still held. I remember a clash between Bruce and someone (it was always between Bruce and someone else…) to do with the moving of clothes on the line. Nasty stuff. The other way we used to compete was with cooking/dishes. We were in ‘teams’, Derek and myself, Heath and Bruce (poor Heath), and each team took it in turns cooking. Co-operative. Washing up was another matter. Each team took it in turns to wash up, with ideally the team who had not cooked having to wash up. But if they left it a day, then they had to wash up tomorrow, and do both days washing. Whilst sometimes we went a few days with a sink full of dirty dishes, the teamwork that your team-mate would coerce you into washing up, or you would them. Everything ran pretty smoothly for the first year, but eventually we got sick of Bruce, and kicked him out. Instead we got Derek’s younger brother, Dane (or Moper, as he was called) as our new house-mate. I seem to recall the system breaking down somewhat then.