Hmmm, what's missing from the lobby? Oh yeah - the furniture! Front desk staff have a new duty to perform every evening: stashing the furniture behind a locked door in the computer lab.

This is the ultra-creative way H.S.I. has figured out how to deal with one problem tenant who camped out in a chair facing the mail room most nights for several years, getting massively drunk, going on racist and violent rants against other tenants who had to pass by to enter and leave the building, cursing out the front desk staff, complaining about how he felt "trapped like a rat in a hole" in his room, and then passing out in the chair for the rest of the night.

Now we don't have to deal with Butch Taylor's raving drunkenness every night. BUT - here's the thing: for years, the lobby was usually a relatively quiet place, and other tenants were able to sit there at any time of day or night without a problem (regardless of what staff may tell you, there was never a curfew on the lobby until 2014). A few tenants would read there late at night it they were having trouble sleeping; others might come downstairs late nights if they weren't feeling well because it was easier to meet an ambulance there if they felt they needed one. Other tenants could sit and socialize with each other, talking or playing Scrabble. Having free access to the lobby made the building feel a little friendlier, and there was an alternative to being stuck in the tiny rooms upstairs, especially during bad weather (there just aren't a lot of other places to go late at night in the neighborhood unless you want to hang out in a bar, or at McDonald's, or one of the two expensive diners in the immediate neighborhood - and those are only solutions if you have money to spend). Now, if tenants are expecting guests in the evening, the guests have to stand until the tenant comes downstairs to get them.

If you want a sample of what Butch sounded like on an average rant, there's an audio clip in the sidebar to the right titled "Butch Flips Out". Scroll down until you hit the picture of a troll doll, and then click on the arrow in the picture. It's just a short sound-bite, but fairly typical of how he sounded when he was getting warmed up - it usually got MUCH worse, fairly quickly, and the verbal abuse was usually accompanied by flailing arms and lots of spit.

Does it make sense to punish EVERYONE just because one person is making things unbearable? Not in a normal universe - but here on Planet Kenmore, it's just another example of management's creative problem solving.