Reader, living in student accommodation was wild.
If you’ve never had the experience, let me describe it to you.
You are thrust together with several people that, in no other circumstance, would you have otherwise met. These people have often never lived away from home before.
Some of them have never lived away from their home country before.
Absolutely no one is operating on a fully-formed adult brain.
Initially it’s terrifying (because new people), then it can be fun (because new people!), and before long, you’re passive-aggressively leaving messages about cleaning up your own dishes and “whoever ate my cheddar, please buy more”.
One of the most effective ways to stop someone from stealing your milk? Simple. Write “contains urine” on the bottle.
Shared uni living is loud, and it’s messy. There’s drama, there’s intrigue, there are illicit relationships, there are decorative beer-can stacks and stolen road sign window displays, and a game I like to call Bin Buckeroo, where you keep stacking rubbish on top of and around the already full garbage receptacle hoping it won’t avalanche across the kitchen floor.
In my first experience of residential university halls, one of the people I lived with was possibly the most flamboyant Italian man to exist: Andre.
Andre, with his broken English, came freshly minted from school in Italy. Sharp-tongued, bold, but with the self-awareness of a dead cat and the audacity of a toddler on crack-cocaine.
This young man did not give a singular fuck about his volume, his music, his attire around the flat (tight underpants and pool slides. All the time. Unrelentingly).
He would invite guests over at all hours, and would make feasts of food and just leave everything—dishes, cutlery, uneaten leftovers—on every single surface of the kitchen. He would loudly declare his undying love for our housemate, Becca after one drunken evening and a moment of madness in a London nightclub, Becca snogged him. (That love was never reciprocated. There were tears. They were Andre’s.)
You can imagine that he was—shall we say—overstimulating to live with.
Fun? Sure.
Frustrating? Oh, you betcha.
One day, he glided into the kitchen in his unnervingly tight boxer shorts and pool slides and announced, as if giving a very important press conference resplendent with flamboyant gesturing, “Guys! I went to THE MAAAANAGEMENT because I have BRRROKEN the TOAST-A MAKER!”.
Of course, we laughed. Not because he’d broken the toaster, but because “toast-maker” is an objectively incredible way of describing it.
And we knew that he would have also had to have said this exact word to the stern, long-suffering management team as well who would often stare through you with a face like a battered fart if you dared to make any reasonable request.
“Why are you LAUGHING at me? I THOUGHT you would LIKE to KNOW! They will BRRING us the new TOAST-A MAKER!”
We had to explain that we weren’t being mean, but that we were amused with the idea of seeing the toaster from a different perspective. I mean, he wasn’t wrong. The toaster DID make toast.
And true to his word, we got a new toaster.
Here’s the thing:
Andre wasn’t the perfect flatmate. He was, objectively, a menace, but he did what needed to be done and communicated that clearly.
He didn’t sit there wondering if management would sense the loss of a toaster through “vibes”. He went and asked (and got us a new toaster).
He didn’t whinge behind closed doors or quietly hope someone else would deal with it.
Meanwhile, the rest of us?
We wrote snarky notes about dishes.
We hid in our rooms when he threw parties.
We bitched behind his back about the mess.
We never actually confronted him.
We just let resentment fester, while cosplaying politeness.
And that’s where this gets real for you (and, let’s be honest, for me too):
When you’re building a brand, running a business, leading a team—
Politeness without action?
Politeness without honesty?
It’s not that fucking polite.
It’s fear dressed up in good manners.
It’s leadership theatre.
Real communication requires clarity.
Even if you mangle the words a bit.
Even if you sound ridiculous calling a “toaster” a “toast-maker”.
It’s better to be the messy, honest, slightly chaotic human who actually says the thing—than the resentful ghost of Christmas-Bin-Buckaroo, waiting for everything to magically get better or someone else to deal with the problem.
Sure, this diverges slightly from creating content, but how you do one thing in life is how you do a lot of things.
Be more Andre.
Break the toast-maker.
Say what you fucking mean, babycakes. In your content, in your work, in your relationships.
Same time next week?
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Gemma :)
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