By Noah Parks

I have two animals and a fiancé. I love them very much, but none of them know how to box a table. My dog, Arlo, loves the idea. My cat, Paws, settles indifferently next to his food bowl and waits for my next great idea. Lucy, my fiancé, loves me for asking, and is also helpless. So, I settled into a YouTube rabbit hole. It’s winding and deep. There’s various twists and turns as the videos go from dryly instructional (deeply frustrating), to stylized for professionals (I like that, reminds me of my job), and finally to the tediously simplified (harder to understand than the instructional ones). I’ve found the journey to the center of boxing fairly entertaining. Eventually, I start folding a sheet over my kitchen table. It was like a child wrapping a present and using too much tape. If you looked too closely, you’d see the tied-up ends of the sheet under the table. It’s exactly what I needed in my PDR. A massive success by my “Homespitality” standards.

Besides my unhealthy obsession with this staple of event service, it seems to me that no matter how many times I successfully box a table, I immediately forget it. The thumbs, the fold, tracing the line, *poof*, gone. Why? People who have done 40 tables can’t tell you how, but they could probably do 40 more twice as fast as the first set. I believe it’s because the gods of hospitality deem it so. During this time, I’m actively trying to remind my brain of the steps to master boxing.