The
living arrangements are actually not so strange or inconvenient normally. Before my arrival, I was amused to receive a
questionnaire that asked the kind of questions that my children had to fill out
when applying for their college dorm rooms.
Did I prefer a colder setting for the air conditioning? Was I neat?
A morning person? Did I cook with
strong spices? How did I rank the
importance of each of these factors? In
fact, the General Services Office (GSO) appears to do a fairly good job of
matching people up, seeming to put people together of the same rank and
employment category. There are stories
of roommate conflicts, however, including one widely circulated story of two
women who had a physical altercation and were quickly returned to the U.S., but
these are rare. (The fight evidently
started when one woman drank from the other's bottle of water.)
In
fact, a few flatmates are close friends and socialize with each other, but most
flatmates coexist with very little interaction. In the first category often seems to be people who like to cook, and so they include their flatmate along with others for dinner parties. But more common is the story of an
acquaintance, who said he was on a different schedule from his new flatmate. After not seeing or meeting him for the first
two weeks after the flatmate arrived, my acquaintance stopped by his flatmate's
office to introduce himself. My roommate
also rises earlier than I do, so, while we are on cordial terms, we actually
speak to each other very rarely. When I
return to the apartment, his bedroom door is closed and I don't know if he is
in. I enter my own bedroom and I might
hear the door open and close as he arrives later. He's often out in the evenings or weekends
(since he seems to do a lot of running), and, while I'm more often in, I'm in
the bedroom with the door closed.
Just
like with college roommates, the areas of interaction, and possible friction,
have to do with use and care of the common areas. Although my roommate and I both seem
basically to shower in the mornings, since he rises earlier than I do, we don't
seem to have a problem sharing the bathroom.
In ten months, I have had only about three occasions when I wanted to
use the bathroom and wasn't able to because my flatmate was. We're both fairly neat people, so we
informally take turns cleaning the bathroom and occasionally will run a vacuum
cleaner over the carpeting in the foyer.
My flatmate doesn't use the kitchen at all, so I can store whatever
incidental items that I want without any worries, and wash the dishes that I
use, perhaps not immediately but enough to usually keep the kitchen fairly
orderly. He also hasn't brought much
with him, so he told me that I could store excess belongings in the common area
closets. Other than that, however, our
common areas are unfortunately quite bare.
I was in someone else's apartment, one that had a table cloth on the
table and kitchen magnets on the refrigerator.
The decorative touches seemed to make the apartment more of a home.
My
flatmate and I do seem to have a different attitude toward security. He surprised me with an e-mail one day noting
that I had left the apartment door unlocked.
He also mentioned that he had returned to the apartment several times to
find the door had been left ajar. He
said that was the reason why he had started to leave his bedroom door always
locked, and asked me to be sure to keep the apartment door locked and to shut
it behind me. I replied that I had not
been aware of the problem, and that he should have advised me when it first
became an issue for him. So there we
are. He's probably in his forties and
I'm in my fifties, but we have to deal with such issues, like college roommates
after all.
While
the loss of privacy is probably minimal, it is there. When I returned from my last break, my
flatmate was away on his. I found I
luxuriated in the knowledge of being purely in my own space, at "home." I didn't have to wonder whether he might hear
the TV or my music if I played it late at night. On his return, I was disappointed when he
told me that he had extended an extra month, so that he would be departing Iraq
on the same day rather than a month before me.
I know he feels the same way. I
was just boiling water for green tea in the kitchen when he returned, after
10:00 at night. He grimaced slightly
when he saw me, and then gruffly greeted me.
I said hello, and he swiftly retreated to his room.