Three tables for one dinner

Among friends planning a dinner in Al Khobar, it has become normal to hold more than one table. One person books the seafood place on the corniche, another books somewhere in the next street, and someone keeps a third option just in case. At the last minute the group chooses, and the other two tables sit empty.

Nobody means any harm. Nobody is trying to hurt a waiter or a cook. Each booking is free, quick and easy to forget.

But a consequence does not need an intention. Across a city, thousands of small, harmless holds add up to empty tables at the busiest hour, food prepared for guests who never come, and staff sent home early on what should have been a good night. Then the places respond the only way they can. They ask for a card to hold a table. They charge a deposit. They stop answering the phone and hand everything to a system that treats every guest as a suspect.

And the guests complain about the deposit, without seeing that they wrote the rule themselves.

This is how most systems work. Nobody designs the bad outcome. It is assembled out of private, reasonable choices that never meet each other, and every person involved can honestly say it was not them.

That is true, and it does not help. If you are part of the system, you are part of what it produces, whether you meant to be or not.

The first step is only to see it: to notice that the free booking was not free, that somebody somewhere paid for it. Once you see that, the next step becomes obvious, and it costs one message.

Changing a system usually starts there, with people who notice they are inside it.