The List on the Fridge

Three people had shared the flat for two years, and the kitchen had been the only room any of them argued about. Nobody argued loudly. What happened instead was that the bin filled up, and then it filled up further, and at some point somebody emptied it and said nothing about having done so.

Nour raised it twice at dinner. Both times everybody agreed that the kitchen was everybody’s, both times the week that followed was better than the week before it, and both times the situation was back where it had started within a month. Ferdinand said, accurately, that they were all reasonable people.

What finally changed it was a sheet of paper with seven rows and three columns, which Wibke put on the fridge without announcing it. The rows were the days of the week. The columns were their names. There was nothing in the boxes and no instruction anywhere on the sheet.

Within four days the sheet was half full, and the entries were not promises but records: somebody wrote their initials in a box after they had done the thing, not before. It became clear from the first week that two of them had been doing rather more than they thought, and one rather less.

Nobody said this out loud, and nobody needed to. The sheet said it, and a sheet cannot be argued with in the way a person can. Ferdinand later said that the useful thing about it was not the fairness but the memory: an agreement lasts a week, and a written record lasts as long as it hangs there.