Housemate Rulesets

In my life I've lived with other people four times, not including my family. Once was with a roommate in college (of which I'd like to not think about), once was a house of four in Santa Cruz, once with a co-worker in Pasadena, and now with three co-workers in Monterey. What's interesting, is each time the social dynamics have been completely different.

In Santa Cruz, my housemates would occasionally watch me play video games, we'd watch movies together, we'd occasionally cook meals together/for each other, but for the most part we were four separate people living in one house. There were no hard rules about anything and the only thing we shared was toilet paper. This worked really well, but I think mostly because we were all pretty laid back. There was the occasional grumble fest by whoever couldn't handle the sink filled with dishes anymore, but no real explosions.

In Pasadena, we didn't have any real rules either, but I found my personal grumblefests to happen more often. I believe most of it was my crazy inherited OCDness, so I tried to keep things to myself and do passive aggresive things like turn off the kitchen light while Jeff was still in the room hoping he'd catch on that it bugged me when he left it on. That never worked.

So now I'm in a house with four guys, who are all programmers (who I think tend to be more stubborn about their opinions than most). We also all work together, so we see a lot of each other. These are the probable causes of what seem to be more conflicts and grumblefests in this household, so we've been having house meetings and setting up sets of rules as we go. What makes me laugh about this is when we watch the show Big Bang Theory and we realize we're those four guys. We haven't gone so far as to need motions to add something to the agenda of our meetings (we haven't quite gotten that bureaucratic yet), but I wouldn't be surprised if we got there at some point.