(post, Neil Nathanson)
In my last blog post I reported on the dramatic improvement in my college meals when my roomates and I started voting a gold star to the winner of the weekly cooking competition. Many years later, in law school, I again found myself living with several classmates. This time, we rarely prepared communal meals. Spaghetti was a staple in the house. It's fast to prepare, tastes great, and fits a frugal student's budget. On some nights, four or five us us might each separately prepare our own spaghetti dinner. Wasted effort? You bet. But, we just didn't have the organizational skill or motivation to share meal preparation. With that many people cooking each night, however, clean-up was critical. Without timely clean up, the pots and pans would pile up in no time. Furthermore, if you didn't clean the spaghetti pot immediately, the next spaghetti chef would be inconvenienced. The solution - THE WALL OF SHAME. I don't remember all of the clean up rules, but I do recall that infractions were reported on a piece of paper posted on the kitchen wall for all to see. As you might imagine with a group of budding lawyers, there were great debates regarding whether reported infractions were fair, and whether the wall accorded sufficient due process to alleged violaters. Notwithstanding some heated moments, the kitchen stayed a lot cleaner, as nobody wanted to be outed on the WALL.