[Noisebridge-discuss] Shelter and housing, jorgen and drama

[rachel lyra hospodar]

i also want to point out a small but important part of my message - that
i am finding that this issue is making me too upset to deal with this
person productively or kindly.

some personal anecdata:

i once had to stage a 1-on-1 emergency intervention with someone i was
dating that was sliding deep into alcoholism.  we don't talk much now
but she did quit drinking.

alcoholism runs deep in my immediate family.

one of my first roommates was an alcoholic.

a few years ago i lost a dear friend to liver failure due to chronic
alcoholism.  in the wake of that death i counseled her daughter and
partner through some seriously hard times.  that partner is now
struggling with alcoholism on his own.

Recently several dear friends of mine quit drinking and joined AA
because they were ruining their lives.

Many of you know me as a reasonable, even calm or nice person.

Many of you may think i am obstinate and opinionated.

Most of you probably think of me as someone who is self-confident and
able to deal with problems as they arise.

In this instance i find the spectre of someone sinking deeper into
alcoholism, and behaving offensively towards me as a result, to be far
too triggering to allow me to behave completely rationally around that
person.

I do not expect this fact about myself to change rapidly.

I don't de-humanize someone who suffers from this problem, but after a
lifelong acquaintance with the negative consequences of this behavior i
have to say that i do believe it is very detrimental to the productive
environment we are trying to create, and i do not think there are any
quick and easy solutions.

I have in the past liked jorgen very much, but when this disease
rendered him unable to take "no" or "go away" for an answer, a sort of
basic level animalistic protectionism kicks in for me and i refuse to
engage any further.

I do not expect this fact about myself to change rapidly.

R.

On 12/6/2011 3:38 PM, Rubin Abdi wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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