[Noisebridge-discuss] Shelter and housing

[Rubin Abdi]

Joseph Brenner wrote, On 2011-12-06 14:33:
> Um... if you've been annoyed by a drunk, that last thing you want is
> to have people pressuring you to have some sort of Serious Discussion
> with the bozo.  What you typically want is for the idiot to just leave
> you the fuck alone.

Funny story (well not really but it seems note worthy here):

About a year or so ago I was at Noisebridge late one night. Drinking,
not drinking, drunk or sober, who really remembers. I was extremely
annoyed with the amount of shit people were pack ratting on the
hackshelf. We had all these shit SCSI under 20GB drives for about a year
sitting around. Every time I wanted to just simply toss them into the
recycling people would stop me and say they were good and someone should
do something with them eventually. No one did, and I was wondering what
sound a hard drive would make being thrown out of the side of a 3rd
floor build onto the sidewalk.

I grabbed one, went outside onto the fire escape, waited for a moment
when no one was anywhere remotely near by on the sidewalk (it was like 4
in the morning) and in my infinite wisdom tossed the drive off into the
void that is Mission street.

John M was leaving Noisebridge shortly there after, noticed a hard drive
outside in front of our gate, picked it up and noticed the drive on the
ground with a dent on one of the corners, remembered that there was some
intoxicated commotion leading up to the fire escape a few minutes before
he left. He started to walk home, then turned around and came back up to
Noisebridge, and very much had a problem with me for being a completely
out of line jerk. Things got heated, he got more annoyed with me, I got
angry at him for saying certain words to me, said he would bring up my
actions at the next meeting and have me removed from the space because
all this crap I've done is bull shit and left.

A couple of days later John M and I traded some emails, we agreed that
we were kind of hot headed during that night, I apologized for what I
was doing and he said he was sorry for yelling at me. We met up in
person and talked about it more, and said more sorries about the whole
thing.

Since then we totally are ok with being in the same place, working
together, and generally being good folks around each other. If we
weren't both willing to talk about the problems we encountered that
particular night where I like a drunken asshole did something that
pissed someone off, we would most likely have a very awkward co-working
hacker relationship while in the same space. Who knows, I could have
finally gotten my dream of being banned from the space if we didn't have
a little bit of a cool off period and allowed some conflict resolution
to happen.

> My apologies if I'm projecting my own attitudes here, but really,
> don't make the problem worse by bugging the victim any further.

I've never had a bad interactions with Jörgen, and I think he's
generally a reasonable guy. It sucks he did some unexcellent stuff, but
in all honesty ignoring that he's still a human being and a member of
our space by shunning away from rational conflict resolution, going
straight to a meeting where the community talks about all of the bad
stuff so and so person did without even inviting the guy getting mud
slinged at him, I feel is even more unexcellent.

Rachel's description of the night sounds like a horrible thing, and I'm
really sorry she had to deal with all that suck in a bucket. I don't
find her to be a "victim" in any sense other than she had to deal with
some bull shit when she was being a reasonable person. I think that her
initial message in this thread is totally appropriate, but I'm simply
asking if anyone has attempted to reached out to the person being a
problem and kindly pointed out what he did fucking sucks and was
provided an avenue to respond back to that? And I'm not trying to defend
Jörgen here either, I signed off on his membership form as a sponsor so
I feel a slight bit like I failed as a member of this community.

However what I want to push for is having the group work on things like
this as a bunch of hackers with good conflict resolution and problem
solving skills, and not turn into a witch hunt where the first community
response is to immediately shun out the primary person you want to
include in on such efforts, especially well before anyone's put in
effort to work this out on a smaller more manageable and reasonable levl.

I could be wrong and totally ignoring emails I've had my mail client
automagically mark as read that detail out such one on one reaching outs
and conflict resolutions, and that we are in fact at "the last straw"
and the only way we could ever fix this is to have an entire community
push someone we brought in back out for being totally unreasonable and
unresponsive to our efforts to resolve conflict with.

In the end the hard drive made a very unsatisfying thud sound, but the
way John M and I ultimately handled ourselves made me happy that within
this community we have some very reasonable (though at times hot headed,
like myself) hackers.

-- 
Rubin
rubin at starset.net

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