When the paper menu went

The café near the corniche in Jeddah that a group of older men have sat in for years took away its paper menus. Now there is a printed square code on each table, and you order from your phone.

Watch the regulars and you can see the ways people meet a change that arrives faster than they would like.

One man refuses to see it. He waves at the waiter as he always has, orders out loud, and treats the code as if it were a stain on the table. For him the change is an insult, and acting as if nothing has happened is a way of not being insulted.

Another quietly gives up. He decides this is not his place any more, that the world moved on without asking him, and he stops coming. He has not lost the argument. He left before it began.

A third tries to force it back. He complains to anyone who will listen and demands the old menu. For a few weeks the staff keep one laminated copy behind the counter for him. It will not last, and he knows it.

The fourth man looks at the code, asks his grandson to show him how it works on a Friday afternoon, and orders for the whole table the next morning. He still calls the waiter over to ask what is good today. He has seen what changed, accepted that it changed, and used what he has, his family and his habit of asking, to keep the mornings he comes for.

It has not given him the café exactly as it was. Nothing would. But of the four men, he is the only one still sitting at that table.