The building chat

The lift in a building in Faisal has been broken for nine days, and the residents' group chat has two hundred new messages about it.

Someone posts a quote from a repairman. Someone else replies with a different repairman. A voice note arrives from the fourth floor. Three people answer a question that was asked yesterday and already settled. The man on the sixth floor, who has the most to lose, has stopped reading.

Everyone is talking and nothing is being decided.

A thread like this looks like conversation, but it lacks what makes conversation work. Nobody is in the same room, so nobody can read a face or settle a point in one sentence. And nobody is writing slowly either, so nothing gets thought through. What wins is whoever answers first, not whoever has thought hardest.

The result is a decision assembled by accident, from whichever messages people happened to see.

There are two better ways, and both ask more of us. One is to put it all down in one place: the three quotes, the cost per flat, the single question that needs a yes or a no. Written once, read properly, answered properly. The other is to get the people who care into the entrance hall on Friday evening for twenty minutes and agree.

Either way, someone has to decide that the question deserves real attention.

The thread is easier than both. That is exactly why the lift is still broken.