First Condo Meeting

Tonight was the annual condo association meeting, and for some reason I was oddly excited to go. I thought it would be fun to meet other people and learn a little bit about how the building runs, but it turns out groups of people meeting to decide things is never fun.

First danger sign: I was the only person there under 60 - apparently all the young, working people in the building know not to bother showing up at these things. As a result all the attendees are the retired people, who aren't exactly in a hurry to get stuff done.

Second danger sign: There were three candidates running for three spots on the board, and we still had to vote on them. Oy.

Third problem: The budget for next year is slightly (3.5%) higher than this year, but because there was a bunch of money saved up in the reserves, the monthly fee we pay will actually be lowered. What's not to like about paying less money? Plenty, apparently. People were so confused about paying less for a higher budget, and upset that we didn't get copies of the line item budget, that they made the building manager go back to his office and print them out.

Next problem: The big building project for next year is to redo the hallways, since they have been the same since the building was built in the 1970s, and are kind of dark and dingy. Tonight they introduced the architect from the firm that will be designing the new hallways, and the goal was just to tell people that by next summer he'll have drawn up sketches we can vote on. Instead, there was a full 30 minutes of people getting up and sharing their opinions about hallways - ranging from, "I was in a building once and they had really lovely red hallways" to "why can't each floor have its own theme?" to one gentleman's impassioned speech against the "disturbing homogenization" of hallways across America. I felt really bad for that architect.

I finally gave up and left over an hour into the meeting, since by that point I was starving and the conversation had moved on to an argument about hallway temperature between the residents of the top floors ("they're far too hot!") and those on the bottom floors ("they are freezing!").

As far as I know, the meeting is still going on. I think this will be my first and last experience with attending.