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On Restaurant Lists

I've had a decent amount of practice coordinating dinners and otherwise trying to rally the troops. And if you do something often enough, you pick up a few tricks. For example, whenever I send out an invitation for a meal, I usually tell people the details of the reservation (e.g., it's for 4 people, under my name, at 6:30PM, on Thursday). It helps to resolve any issues that might come up, and streamlines the process. If you're the first one there, you know exactly what to ask for, and you're not trying to figure out if others in the party have arrived yet or not. Otherwise, you and the host(ess) get to play "guess the reservation" for a few minutes. It's a simple thing, but it helps.

One thing in particular I've found is that if you're asking "where do you guys want to eat?" the conversation is much, much simpler if you throw out at least one suggestion. People can say either yes or no to the options you suggest, and it helps start the conversation in a productive manner. The alternative is a lot of "I'm okay with whatever" or "well, what does everyone else want to eat?" Sure, those are nice things to ask, but it's an incredibly slow, tedious process. I'm not having that.

What's more, a lot of this stuff has become habit by this point. In fact, it's become such an ingrained habit, that I do this in my personal life, as well. So, with one group of folks with whom I routinely have dinner, I always make a 3 restaurant list, and ask people to vote. We fell into the pattern a while back, and it's just worked. So, we all decide to have dinner, I look up any places I think might be fun, and we all decide on a spot.

That's worked beautifully for years. Just to be clear, this plan has worked without fail for so many years and months that I do not remember just when we started. This plan has been successful just as long, if not longer, than some of my nephews and nieces have been alive (technically, they're something like my cousins once removed, but as far as I'm concerned, they're nephews and nieces). It's a pretty solid plan, is what I'm saying.

Until this last time.

We all decided on a place, and I sent out an email with the reservation details. All was going according to plan. Then on the night of, the Mild Ex and I showed up at the place a few minutes early. As it turned out, we weren't the only ones who were early, so we had some company. The last person, however, wasn't there. We didn't worry about it much, but when 15 minutes past the appointed hour came, we started to wonder a bit. She's usually not the type to be that late, and even when is running a little late, she'll usually let someone know where she is. But we hadn't heard from her, so we were a little confused.

Not two minutes later, she walked in, with a story to tell. As it turned out, she'd shown up about 10 minutes earlier, but she hadn't seen any of us. This particular restaurant looked small, and it wasn't apparent that we were seated in the patio out back. Heck, it didn't even look like there was a patio out back. So, she stood there, puzzled by the fact that she didn't see us. After all, she figured she couldn't be the first person there.

To make matters worse, she'd accidentally grabbed the wrong phone when she left home, so she didn't have any of our phone numbers. She didn't have our email addresses handy, either, so there were limited communication numbers. Also, remember that I had previously sent out a list of 3 places from which we had selected. She started to wonder if she'd remembered the wrong restaurant, and we were actually sitting in one of the other places. This plan of ours had actually started to back fire (insert sad dramatic music here).

Luckily, she figured she'd chance it, and walked in to ask. The hostess confirmed that we were actually present, and showed her to our table. All in all, it wasn't a huge wait, and we all had a good laugh about it. But there is now a chink in the armor, and I'm going to have to see if we can close this gap. I mean, we can't be having this list plan falling apart now. It's practically tradition at this point.

Incidentally, if you've got any ideas, I'm all ears.

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