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I love our house but sometimes it really does get tough, even for exec board members, to live there.
I held the NMC office for my sorority, effective January - December 2003. My first semester, I feel like I did a much better job, because I could go home after chapter and NM meetings and work on my stuff for the next week.
As NMC and all of exec board are required by our bylaws to live in the house for the second semester of their term and the semester after (we can't move in the middle of the year because of housing agreements with Gannon) I moved in last August. Our house sleeps 9. I was real excited when I moved in, and lucky enough to get my own bedroom which I made use of in preparing things for the New Members (I felt like arts and crafts chair a lot of the time and it spread out all over my room).
However, and this is not typical by any means, I was having trouble keeping up with my New Member paperwork and organization, even though for most of the meetings I just had to walk downstairs. I ended up faxing a lot of paperwork in to IHQ because I didn't have enough time to send it by snail-mail. I think it has to do with your preferences and also whether or not you have a thick skin. I was (and still am) fully capable of carrying out the duties of my office and doing a good job. However, I found myself overwhelmed and depressed most of the time.
A lot of it had to do with the rest of my schedule the semester I moved in. I had a heavy courseload, and my studies really suffered the semester I moved in. I also was trying to re-vamp the new member program, and it was creating a lot of drama in my chapter because it hadn't been changed in at least 5 or 6 years, and with new hazing rules and laws in place, we needed to cut out a lot of things that are now considered hazing.
To be honest, I think it was the changes I was making that was causing me the most heartache. The house was split 5 to 4 in favor of hazing, and my roommates and sisters were slamming doors in my face even if I went to ask them for a piece of tape or something.
There were fun times, too, though, especially when the dust settled from the new member changes, but overall, while I love my sisters (even the ones that hated me), I was left with a horribly negative view of living in the house and I would never do it again.
I think I'd rather live on the streets, to be honest with you... When I say you need a thick skin to live in the house AND hold an office where there is a lot of work, it's true, especially if you only can house 9 out of 40 members. When sisters come to the house, you take the heat for it not being spotless (of course, I mean, they did spend a whole hour of a saturday morning cleaning it, didn't they? so of course they can come over and trash it then whine because it's not clean). When something goes wrong or someone doesn't like how you're running your office, you take the heat. There were days where I would go from a chapter meeting in which the entire general discussion was basically about how crappy a person I am and how much they regret giving me NMC, and then I would go home and someone (who didn't live in the house) would be standing in the living room whining about how my homework was on the coffee table and aren't I a jerk because I made them spill their drink all over it?
That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.
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