Problem

One of the main problems we now have in Taos is the lack of cups to drink from. At the beginning of each semester, people perform an inventory of all the utensils we have in the kitchen to see if we need to buy more. In September 2003, the number of cups was 105, enough for the 87 people living in the fall semester in the house. By the end of October, we realized that we had fewer cups than before. One of the possible reasons was that lots of cups could have been broken by accident, but we discarded this possibility since the cups are made of plastic and therefore hard to break. The other possibility was that somebody could have stolen the cups but we also have discarded this option since nobody saw strange people around. Also, if it had happened, the person who had taken the cups would have stolen a few of them but not the 70 or so cups we miss.

The more probable reason to explain the lack of cups in Taos is that people take these cups to their rooms and do not return them. We thought that this could be the more probable reason since everybody had seen other people taking cups to their rooms although it is forbidden by the rules (Rich 29).