The listing says closed

In this month I look a restaurant up the way its customer does, before I look at anything it is running.

Search the name. Read the hours on the map listing. Open the delivery app and read the line at the top of its page. Then, if I am near it, look at the door.

Four surfaces, and in about half the small places I check they do not agree. The map still carries January's hours, nine in the morning until eleven at night, because that is what somebody typed when the listing was claimed. The app has said closed since the afternoon. The door has a sheet of paper taped to it in marker pen with the real times on it, and that sheet is the only accurate document in the set. The phone rings out, because at four in the afternoon nobody is in the building.

Meanwhile the account is posting. Open until three. Come after prayers. The photography is good and somebody argued about the caption for a day.

Nobody is asking what the food is like. This month the first question is whether the place is open now, and it gets asked at eleven at night by a person deciding between two names on a screen. They do not read the caption. They tap the name, and the map answers on the restaurant's behalf.

A month is not a campaign. It is four surfaces that have to say the same sentence for thirty days, and only one of them costs nothing to change. That is the one the customer reaches, and it is the one that goes stale, because correcting it is nobody's idea of work.

The campaign says come at ten. The listing says closed. The customer only ever meets the listing.