How the System Works

Core concepts

Blocks, seats, desks, and houses: the four words that make every other page on this site readable.

Four words carry every other page on this site: house, desk, block, and seat.

01 House One of Penn’s 13 college houses.

02 Desk The front desk inside it. The desk gets staffed.

03 Block 30 minutes of a desk’s day, on the hour or the half hour.

04 Seat One place at that desk for one block, one worker.

No screen shows this. It underlies every screen.

How it works

Assigning, dropping, claiming, floating, swapping, and counting hours all move in whole blocks, never part of one, so an hour is always two blocks.

A block holds as many seats as the desk needs.

House	Seats per block (school year)
Harnwell	2, 08:00 to 24:00
Upper Quad	3, 08:00 to 24:00
The other 11 houses	1, 08:00 to 24:00

Each seat has one owner, so two racing workers cannot both win and the loser is told so. Nobody holds two seats of one block.

A house is where a worker is hired. A desk is the post being covered. They split on a float: an Upper Quad worker covering Lauder staffs Lauder’s desk and keeps Upper Quad.

All times are Penn local, America/New_York. A block is always 30 real minutes, even on clock-change nights, so a clock change moves no hours.

Why it works this way

One fixed unit keeps every operation exact and comparable. Seat counts belong to the desk, not the house, because a summer season can change one partway through.

What this means for you

Blocks bound what you can drag, seats start the coverage ladder, and desk against house drives Floating.