Cass

The "eight usable days out of fourteen" framing killed the four city plan on the spot.

The plate-before-name thing is the one people skip. If a driver asks "are you Bri?" anyone standing there can say yes. You should be the one confirming their details.

Matches my experience. The people I've seen regret it were the ones who couldn't articulate what they wanted changed beyond "more".

Go early. Walking into a restaurant at 6:30 when it's half empty is a completely different experience to walking into a full room at 8:30 with everyone already seated. Staff have time, you get a decent table rather than the one by the toilets, and nobody is waiting on you to free it up.

Other things that made it easy for me:

• sit at the bar or the counter if there is one, that's where solo diners are normal everywhere in the world
• lunch first, then dinner. Lunch alone feels ordinary and it builds the muscle
• bring something to look at for the first five minutes, then put it away once food arrives

The display feeling fades fast, honestly within about four meals. Nobody is looking. The waiter has seen forty solo diners this month.

Same pattern for me, roughly every ten days. Once I stopped treating it as a sign I should go home it stopped being a big deal.

Set yourself a deadline now, while you're calm. Mine is eight weeks: if the situation hasn't materially changed in eight weeks, I start looking, no further deliberation. Otherwise you'll be here at month eleven having the same conversation with yourself.

Two things, actually, and I hadn't thought about either since the interview. That's probably my answer.

"The opposite of misery is quiet" has genuinely reframed the whole thing for me. I think I was waiting for a feeling that isn't a normal part of employment.

Small operators are far more flexible than big ones because a human reads your email. I've had one put me in a triple with two other solos at no extra cost simply because I asked whether that was possible.

I ask this at every final round now. The quality of the answer sorts companies faster than anything else I've tried.