Somebody Renamed the Group Chat

The old name was a place. Nine of us went there once, in 2019, and the chat has been named after it ever since and nobody under any circumstances refers to it out loud by that name.

The new name is a joke from last Tuesday. It is a good joke. It will not be funny in three weeks and everybody knows that, including the person who did it, who did it at 11pm and has said nothing about it since.

Four people reacted with a laugh. Two said nothing. One asked, genuinely, what it was a reference to, which is the message that has stayed with me — because he was there on Tuesday and he still did not have it.

And one person changed it back the following morning. Also without comment. It has been the old name since Thursday and not one of the nine of us has referred to any of this in the chat.

This is why changing one is never neutral, and why the person who changes it is always slightly braver than they realise at 11pm.

The 2019 name says the group is a group because of that weekend. That is a claim. It is also, quietly, a ranking of everything that has happened in the six years since, all of which lost to a Saturday in 2019.

Renaming it to last Tuesday says: actually, now. Which is a lovely thing to say and is the reason four people laughed, and it is also a much more fragile claim, because last Tuesday has to keep being funny and 2019 does not have to do anything at all — it is finished, it cannot disappoint anybody.

Changing it back is not conservatism. It is a group choosing the safer of the two claims, which is what a group of nine will do almost every time, because the safe claim requires nothing of anyone.

Three hours between his message and the next one, which was about something else entirely.

I have gone back and looked, because this paper is mostly me going back and looking. He has asked a question in that chat eleven times this year. Four were answered. The other seven were passed over — not rudely, not deliberately, just followed by somebody else's message on another subject.

He posts about as often as anybody. He is not on the edge of this group by any measure you could put in a spreadsheet, and by the only measure that matters he has been on the edge of it for about a year.

I answered him on Thursday, two days late, explaining a joke that was no longer funny. He said ah, thanks. That is the whole exchange and I think it is the most useful thing I have done in that chat since 2019.

I counted, which is what this paper is, and the split is not close. Five accounts produced something like ninety-four per cent of the messages this year. Four have posted a handful of reactions and nothing else.

None of the four has left. That is the thing worth sitting with. Leaving a group chat is an event — it produces a line in the transcript with your name on it — and staying silently in one costs nothing and produces no line at all.

So the group is nine and the group is five, simultaneously, and which of those two numbers is true depends entirely on whether you are looking at the header or at the messages.

I do not think there is anything to fix here. Four people are keeping a door open that they are not walking through, and that is a completely reasonable thing to want, and it is only a problem if the five of us mistake the header for the group.