In December I was walking home from the corner shop. People were standing by the entrance. A few minutes later I had been appointed head of the entrance.
I had no plan to get involved with the building.
I was not going to a meeting. I was not planning to join local self-government. I had not prepared a five-year development programme for the stairwell.
I had a bag from the shop and an intention to reach my flat.
But a meeting was going on outside the building.
I stopped.
Then I asked something.
Then I suggested something.
And then it turned out I was now head of the entrance.
Sometimes new branches of a biography begin exactly like this. Without a decision. Simply by standing nearby for too long.
First a chat appeared
The first thing that surprised me: a lot of people live in one building, but they have almost no shared space.
Someone knows one problem.
Someone knows another.
Someone has already spoken to the management company.
Someone is hearing for the first time that anything is happening at all.
So I made a Telegram chat for the building. There are 105 people in it now.
Not a hundred and five product users. A hundred and five neighbours.
Each with their own flat, their own door, their own idea of what is urgent, who is to blame, and why right now it is completely impossible to do anything.
And it suddenly turned out that a building starts to exist a little differently once it has a place where people can hear each other.
Then the real work began
After that came things that had previously been just part of the scenery.
The entrance.
The intercom door.
Repairs.
The management company.
Owners’ meetings.
Votes.
Documents.
Who is responsible for what.
What can be settled with a conversation, and what needs a formal process.
Repairs are under way in the entrance right now. The intercom door is being reinstalled.
For someone who has never dealt with this, it sounds almost funny. A door, big deal.
But behind any such door a small system suddenly turns up: money, contractors, approvals, people with different interests, and the moment when someone has to stop discussing and see the thing through.
The building turned out to be small-scale politics
Later we had meetings and votes on replacing the head of the building.
And here, for the first time, I saw the building not as a structure. It is a small society.
In it there are people who need nothing.
People who need everything.
People ready to help.
People who trust no one.
People who stay silent for a month and then suddenly write the most important message in the thread.
There are formal powers. There is informal trust. There are decisions that cannot be pushed through merely because they are sensible.
And there is the strange moment when several dozen entirely different people nevertheless agree to do one thing together.
The most unexpected part
At work I have long been used to thinking in systems.
There is a problem.
There are participants.
There is a state.
There is a constraint.
There is a next step.
But I did not expect exactly the same way of thinking to meet me one evening outside my own entrance.
Only instead of an API there is a neighbour from the fourth floor. Instead of logs, a chat history. Instead of a production incident, a door that works every other time.
And instead of documentation, sometimes a woman by the entrance who has lived here for thirty years and knows the history of the question better than any archive.
And the principle is still nearly the same: understand what is going on, gather people around the problem, and carry the change through to the point where it exists somewhere other than the chat.
I am still not planning to become a professional head of an entrance
This is an important clarification.
I have no next career goal of “head of several entrances”. I still sometimes look at this story and wonder how exactly a bag from the corner shop led me to discussions of intercom doors and owners’ votes.
But that is precisely why I want to keep it.
Not everything important begins with intent.
Sometimes you are simply walking home.
People are standing outside.
You stop for five minutes.
And a few months later there are 105 people in the shared chat, repairs are under way in the entrance, the door is being replaced, votes are being held, and you somehow know considerably more about how an apartment building works than you ever intended to.
I was just walking home with a bag. The building decided otherwise.