The building where we live now is the only building where I’ve had doormen. In fact, when I first moved to New York, I never thought I’d ever live in a building with doormen, but alas, here we are. Having doormen seemed like a weird urban luxury, one that is almost like a false security because even with doormen manning your front door, strangers and crazies somehow manage to make their way into all types of buildings. Doormen take breaks, and when those transitions happen, that’s when things slip through the cracks.

But when I did think of doormen when I first moved here, I thought that they handled people coming into and out of units (guests), as well as packages. That’s not actually the case in a lot of buildings, including ours. The security desk and porters in our building handle packages and deliveries. The doormen only handle people coming in the front door – residents and guests. Anyone with a delivery comes through the security entrance and not the front entrance. It’s the way we’re set up. So the “scope” of doormen in our building is less than in other buildings where they also manage packages and deliveries.

It’s also confusing when you move from one doorman building to the next, and the doormen don’t do the same things, so you need to reset your own expectations. For example, I was coordinating a Buy Nothing group pickup on Sunday, and the person I was picking up from told me that although she lived in a doorman building, the doorman “doesn’t like” holding stuff for pickup, so he gives her attitude when she asks. So to prevent this from happening, she just leaves the item with the person’s name on it in a conspicuous place in the lobby, and the person can just pick it up. It’s not necessarily the safest option, as literally anyone could swipe it, but she said she’d never encountered problems with this before.

Another person said she left an item for me in a bag with my name on it with the doorman. When I went to pick it up, the doorman didn’t check anything anywhere and simply stared me in the face and said, “I don’t have anything being held for anyone, no.” I stared back at him, also dead in the eye, and said, “I know there is something here with my name on it in a brown bag. Can you please check?” And I refused to move. He stared me down for a few more seconds, then went to the back room, immediately saw a bag with (gasp) my name on it, and said, “Well, what do you know – here’s a bag with your name on it right here!” And he handed it to me.

Sometimes, I wonder what kind of fake authority people like to assert when in situations like this. Is it so much more fun and fulfilling for them during the day to just sit there and play on their phones instead of actually doing their jobs?

I was a bit late to the game on social media, as I did not join a “Buy Nothing” group until about two years ago, when we had moved from our old unit into our new unit in the same building, and I was about halfway through my pregnancy. My friends suggested my local Buy Nothing group could be helpful for getting lightly used baby items and clothes, which would not only be good for the environment, but also my bank account given how short of a time most of these items are used for. Given that I live on the border of the Upper West Side and Hell’s Kitchen, it oddly wasn’t that straightforward which Buy Nothing group I belonged to given my street address. Every time I did a search for “Upper West Side” and looked up my street number, I couldn’t find any group. The Hell’s Kitchen group boundaries didn’t include my street. So somehow, I got accepted into the Midtown West group, which actually has a street cut-off slightly south of where I live. So in the end, I did get into a group, just not the one I really belonged to.

I didn’t really like this group very much because I realized that the types of things people were giving away didn’t really fit our needs. Plus, when I did see something that fit, I never, not even once, got lucky with the item. I gave away so, so much stuff through this group, and sometimes, I discovered via strange direct messages on Facebook that these people didn’t even NEED the items; they were just hoarding for a potential need in the future… which may never even come up. And that really bothered me. I am not an advocate of hoarding. So earlier this year, I finally decided to do a more thorough search for my actual group based on my address, and I found out why I couldn’t find it: my specific Upper West Side group does not go by “Upper West Side,” but abbreviates to “UWS.” And apparently, it’s the ONLY Upper West Side BN group that does this, so it really threw me off! But when I finally got accepted and switched groups, I never looked back. Just based on the types of things people were posting, I knew I belonged here.

In just over a month of being in this group, I’ve already gotten lucky and scored a number of useful things: board and puppet books, learning and developmental toys for Kaia, like hot wheels, trucks, a doctor kit, cones/rings, and a fun building gears play set. And though Chris thinks I’ve gone crazy, I even picked up 5 bottles of Bundaberg ginger beer that he likes through the group. And when I posted that my daughter would be starting daycare soon and we’d need an extra silicone bib for school, several generous moms replied and gave me three, two of them brand new (in retrospect, I regret giving away the four extras we were gifted that were brand new, naively thinking we didn’t have need for them, as we already had two in active rotation. I definitely won’t be that quick to give anything else away in the future that is similar!). I’ve also given away similar items in this group: a baby “aquarium” for tummy time, a duplicate baby doctor’s play set, clothes, a baby log book, and herbal tea. It’s nice to feel a semblance of community and belonging via this group.