The message arrives in the group at about nine on a Tuesday evening. We should do something. Six people reply with an enthusiastic single word, and then the conversation stops, the way water stops at a closed valve, and everyone waits.

They are waiting for me. They have been waiting for me since roughly 2019. Nobody has ever said so.

How the appointment is made

It is not made. It accretes. You book one thing, once, because you happened to know a place and it seemed easier than another week of we should do something. It goes well. The next time, there is a small pause in the conversation with your name in it.

Within about eighteen months you hold a portfolio. You know which of them cannot do Thursdays, whose partner works shifts, who will say yes to anything and then cancel at four in the afternoon, and who has to be asked directly because they do not read group messages. This information lives nowhere but in your head and constitutes, at this point, a not insignificant part of what you know about anything.

unknown node

The particular texture of the job

It is not the booking. Booking a table takes ninety seconds. It is the fortnight of holding an unresolved thing in your head — three possible dates, two people who have not replied, one venue that will only take a provisional for forty-eight hours — while everyone else enjoys the pleasant sensation of something nice being arranged for them.

It is also the very specific silence that follows sending three options. Not unwillingness. Just a group of adults, all of whom would prefer the decision to be made by somebody else, which is a completely reasonable preference and is precisely why the post exists.

And it is the fact that if the restaurant is bad, it was your restaurant. This is stated lightly and meant lightly and is nonetheless, over a number of years, a small recurring tax.

The experiment

This summer I resigned. Not in a message — that would have been a whole thing, and the point was to avoid a whole thing. I simply did not do it. We should do something arrived, I replied yes, and then I put the phone down and went to read.

Nothing happened for eleven days. I know it was eleven because I counted, which tells you something about how relaxed I was being about it.

On the eleventh day somebody else booked something. It was a Wednesday, which is a terrible day, at a place I would not have chosen, and it was completely fine. Everyone came. Nobody died. The wine was worse and I minded less than I expected to about that, because I had not spent a fortnight carrying it.

What I concluded, reluctantly

That the post is genuinely useful and that holding it permanently is a choice I had stopped noticing I was making. Somebody does have to book the table. The group does not, in fact, self-organise; eleven days is evidence of that. But the job is a job, and a job that one person does invisibly for six years becomes a fact about that person's character rather than a task anybody else could perform.

I have not resigned properly. I do it about half the time now, which was not a negotiated settlement and was never discussed. I just leave some of them alone and see what occurs, and roughly half of them occur.

The other half do not, and I have had to make my peace with that, because the alternative — the thing I did for six years — was to treat the possibility of nothing happening as my personal responsibility to prevent.

It turns out the world tolerates a certain amount of nothing happening. Not everyone will believe this and I did not either. Eleven days. I counted.