Hearing Concerning Festival Doorway Decoration
No resident admits they are comparing. The doorways are compared anyway.
TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS
Standing Committee on Residential Common Conventions
Subject: Festival Doorway Decoration, Floors 4 Through 7
CHAIR: The committee will come to order. We are here to examine the practice described in the submitted complaint as "competitive festive doorway decoration." I want to be precise. This committee does not adjudicate taste. We examine patterns. Resident A, please describe what you observed.
RESIDENT A: I put up a rangoli on the doorstep. Marigold strings on the door frame. Very standard. The next morning, the door across from mine had a string of electric lights that were not there the previous week.
CHAIR: You believe this was responsive to your decoration?
RESIDENT A: I am not saying it was responsive. I am saying I noticed it.
CHAIR: Resident B, are you the occupant of the door opposite Resident A?
RESIDENT B: Yes. I have been meaning to put those lights up since last year. I found the time during the holiday.
CHAIR: And you did not notice Resident A's rangoli before deciding to install the lights?
RESIDENT B: I may have noticed it. I was not comparing.
CHAIR: We have received a report that three additional doors on the floor acquired new decorations in the seventy-two hours following Resident A's installation. Is that consistent with what others observed?
RESIDENT C: I put flowers up because the corridor looked nice and I wanted to participate. That is not competition.
CHAIR: The committee is not calling it competition. We are documenting a pattern in which decoration choices made independently arrive at a common intensity level within a short window without any coordination mechanism. How did you know what constituted appropriate participation?
RESIDENT C: I looked at what was already there.
CHAIR: Thank you. That is the mechanism the committee was trying to identify.
COMMITTEE NOTE: Festival doorway decoration becomes procedurally stable once one installation creates a visible baseline that all subsequent installations are implicitly measured against. Nobody formally agreed on the rule. Nobody admits to applying the rule. The rule operates regardless of admission. Annual repetition is expected. The committee finds no grounds for intervention and no appetite for one.
Proceedings closed.