Why Tables Wobble

The one thing for certain is that at 8 am on a Wednesday, there is no space for casual tardiness. It is like an orange summer breeze of people swirling in and out, the pesto and tomato croissants being placed alongside the lemon marble cake slices while this or that woman drops her voice lower, wears her sunglasses inside the crowded room, and doesn’t have her lipstick amiss. You can’t sit here for long, not because of its wobbly tables, but because Wednesdays wear on quickly every week, and it will soon be time to take meeting notes that no one will read. Bring your ex, too. Come before 8.

A cafe has a long, wooden table made entirely of an axial cross-section of a tree bark. It is polished with a glossy varnish, featuring visible concentric rings and black zone lines that run across the length of the table. It can seat six people at a time, three on each side. Behind the table is a large glass window which overlooks a steady, old, green tree. When I visit the cafe, this communal table is usually empty. It is surrounded by smaller, circular tables that have checkered square tops on which you might be able to play a game of non-serious chess.

The long, wooden table, straight out of a cozy fantasy story, does not move, rattle, or budge. It stays there, solid and unmoving. On the off-chance that I’ve had to sit at the checkered circular table, I find myself saddened, and seated on a wobbly, circular black and white surface. And a wobbly table at a cafe, a bar, a cafeteria, or even in the restaurant at the far end of the universe is an annoyance.

We’ve all met a wobbly table in our lives. That one table in a common space, which, when you occupy it, shakes and does not sit still as it should. You’ve met one. I’ve met one.

A wobbly table is a universal occurrence, a pebble in the shoe, a pearl of boba stuck inside the straw. It is a minor annoyance that I want to correct immediately. These tables exist everywhere in food establishments, sneaking around no matter how hard you try to escape them.

Whenever I come across one, I move to another table or fold up a tissue to steady a leg. I’ve never brought a wobbly table to the attention of staff. If they could have fixed it, it wouldn’t exist. I am not a high-maintenance customer. These things happen—I get it.

Four legs under a large surface, and one eventually becomes shorter. You don’t have to tell me twice.

This pet peeve followed me home one day and has stayed; it grew like an itch on its own, without encouragement. The fact that I always try to fix this annoyance on my own with tissue paper is symptomatic of the default state in my life. I don’t call for help. I roll up my metaphorical balloon sleeves and carry a screwdriver in my skirt, as it were. My mantra is that if other people could have done it, they would have.

After enough incidents of wobbling tables — which count as a sufficient number to be itchy about — I wondered why this is a naturally occurring phenomenon. What is happening behind the table-waiting scenes, in manufacturing units, or even those in the minds of mischievous fairies that shorten a table leg, or lengthen more than one? Why are the table leg toe caps going missing? Who is taking these toe caps, and what for?

Before this, I was not in the habit of gazing at table legs, although I do think that gazing at well-toned legs is an appreciation of beauty, and I mean this just for tables. As I have come to discover, making table legs is a work of art, handed down through generations, and now suffocated by minimalism. In the recent past, I have found myself down the Internet rabbit hole of table-making, ones with ceramic tea-cups and saucers and those without. I’ve voluntarily followed a rabbit and tumbled headlong into a world where I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

#

We eat creamed mushrooms on sourdough, swipe out the coffee for kombucha, and know the names of the wait staff. We have a designated spot; clean, stable, and the perfect amount of cold. It took us a few encounters with wobbly tables to find this one. There’s not much to be said for culinary excellence here; we don’t have good taste. We follow the trends like leaves blowing in the wind. We re-tweet in support of service workers, frequent places with urban greenery, and have stopped wishing upon celebrities. We partake, live in a city where we can’t see the constellations, self-soothe, and choose from only five stars.

 As I stand outside a coffee shop which is curtained by Gulmohar trees and has floor-to- ceiling windows made of light brown wood and glass, I pause for a few minutes and click a perfectly-framed picture. The pastel green, glass, and trees make for an inviting space.

The soft winter light falls on the windows, and I feel a coolness reflected in my eyes. I feel welcomed even before having stepped inside.

I am convinced that the proliferation of urban greenery in my city is by design. It provides calm, privileged spaces by shutting out the incessant honking, dust, and general cacophony. I suspect that my generation escapes into coffee shops to be free of the burden of our ugly cities, even if for a while. At least, that is what I do. It is inside these spaces that I usually read, write, use the restroom, or wait for a friend over a cup of infused chamomile tea or apple, carrot, and beetroot juice. I don’t drink cappuccinos, nor do I eat the chocolate muffins on display, no matter how inviting they seem. And it is inside these cafes, under the faux wood, plywood, glass, or plasticine surfaces where conversation comes to linger, there are table legs which could have been so much more.

Carving a straight and linear table leg has been made easy due to mass manufacturing. Today, a ‘clean appearance’ means that craftsmanship, sculpting, intricate designs, and grooving can be foregone when building these tables. Table legs have their own families, next of kin, and ancestral history. Some of them are curved, some reeded, some rounded, and now, these days, they are simply straight with no need for little curves, angles, inlaid sculptures, or grooves.

In this rabbit hole of wobbly tables, I found my tribe of people who have articulated the wobbly table problem, expressed annoyances, and have also tried to solve it. Most of these articles and posts were from an era when websites were ornately decorated, video quality was granular, and people were talking to shaky screens about how vexing it is to sit at tables that wobble.

It is in these annals of the Internet that I learnt that tables with three legs are less likely to wobble than those with four legs. This is not a design problem; it is a structural engineering problem. A professor of structural engineering living in Boston explains why four-legged tables wobble in a short video where he’s surrounded by ample greenery, as a little girl holds the camera for him, and his blue cup of coffee is perched on a table that shakes. A table is a structure in three dimensions, so the minimum number of supports it needs to balance the load is three, and yet, when it is designed with four legs to account for redundancy, it is more likely to wobble as the structural forces cannot be determined.

Educating myself about the construction of tables, sculpting of table legs, aligning planes, and polishing wood made me feel as if I were in classrooms of yore, trying to learn something anew. It harkened back to the time when knowledge was abundant, but you had to go looking for it, and people who had done this for years were willing to teach newbies their hard-earned skills. It had the texture of sharing, of partaking, of a curiosity of being alive .

In a 20-minute video, a carpenter explains the need for L-shaped support beams to keep a table steady, and for leaving just enough space in the wood so it can expand and contract. After watching the video without interruption, I thought about it for days — how wood contracts and expands. It is something I have known and studied as a child, and I have observed in monsoons on the doors of my house, but I hadn’t sat down and thought about it in a manner of contemplation. A thing is not just a thing; it occupies space and time, and it has a life of its own. A story that is told less often, bequeathed scarcely.

In all possibilities, these tables in food establishments will be replaced someday, with the rapidity of cafe movement across capitalist lines. They might not outlive us; these cafes and restaurants may not exist in a few years. And yet, so many people have put so much thought into building tables. No matter where you go, there’s going to be one that stays put and one that shakes for its life, devoid of structural integrity.

As our short lives and physics go, this problem will always exist, but the fact that enough people before us have tried to solve it in their own way will serve as helpings of wisdom to partake, to build off of, and to stand in awe at the collectivist movement of table- making and furniture repair.

#

After all, what choice did we have? The movies had stopped showing characters sitting under trees, or on the benches of railway and bus stations. As a result, trees and benches had gone out of existence. Third places were all but erased, juices were all but fruits, and conversations were all but original. There was little silence in here. Jazz played in the background, air curtains whooshed air every few minutes, the neighbouring table wobbled, and the laughter around it did not seem to mind. We had a milky coffee, the bill was on the back of a card which had the address of the coffee plants, and the sky outside was gathering clouds.

In the late 1960s, Roger Fenn, a mathematics PhD student at the University of London, visited a cafe with his advisor and sat on a wobbly table. Both gentlemen fiddled with the table, moving it this way and that until they got it to stop wobbling. Afterwards, Roger Fenn returned to his room and drafted a mathematical proof that if you place a table on any uneven surface, it is possible to rotate it such that it will stabilize the table. What started out as a pet peeve gained interest and momentum in later years.

In 2005, a group of mathematicians published a paper on what is colloquially called the Wobbly Table Theorem. Bill Baritompa, Rainer Löwen, Burkard Polster, and Marty Ross have mathematically studied “conditions under which a rectangular table can be placed with all four feet touching a continuous ground by turning it on the spot.” The point to note is that it matters whether the table is a square, rectangle, or circular; and when you rotate it, three of its legs have to be on the floor while the fourth should be the one you’re trying to balance.

It fills me with quiet awe that some of our brightest minds have spent time and thought to solve this problem to the point of making it a mathematical function. Mathematicians say that numbers are fantastical, they make re-discovery of our universe possible, and even fun. To think that they’ve instituted a theorem for wobbling tables is a reflection of this whimsy.

After learning about this theorem, a man tested it on different surfaces and recorded his experience on a video camera. He took a table, a ceramic plate, and a tall transparent glass, and he placed the table on various uneven surfaces such as a cafe table on a cobblestone and cemented sidewalk, an unstable wooden boardwalk, and a stone pathway in a green space. In one extreme instance, he places the table on small rocks lying haphazardly on the ground, and then, not only does he rotate it enough for stability, but he also sits down at it with his glass on the table.

Armed with this new information that rotating the table less than 90 degrees while three of its feet are steady on the ground, and the fourth one meets it at a particular angle, I went out into the world of cafes and restaurants wanting to try it myself. This time, I wanted to meet a wobbly table, not avoid it. I tested this theorem with circular tables (because it is difficult to move rectangular tables in cafes without haphazardly arranging their space). It does work.

#

We had thirty minutes to spend between the two of us. It was a celebration or something like that. Delayed, but not forgotten. The salad was cold, the soup warm, and the company consistent. Every table had the same dessert that we had all agreed upon, without speaking. We spoke of the upcoming war, mutual funds which are subject to market risks, and growing interest in buying mics. The lights were low, which did not seem to elevate our anxieties. We stuck a folded tissue under our table, and then we drank our soup in ceremonial quiet.

There are so many causes of why tables shake — floors become uneven over time, wear and tear of table toes, contraction and expansion of materials, bolts and screws give way, quality of manufacturing is sub-par, and as we know, life happens. Economic and social forces now dictate that replacement is better than repair, and the mending feels harder than moving. While I was trying to find why I was peevish about tables that wobble, I found a tribe of people who felt the same way as me.

Over 10 years ago, a duo in Australia was studying why tables don’t stay stable over the course of time in commercial establishments, and they followed the problem all the way to the doorstep of fluid dynamics. They invented an instrument that is installed at the bottom of tables and uses fluids to automatically align the table when it is misaligned. This invention encompasses all possible causes of wobbly tables.

Another man entered the Dragons’ Den (UK version of Shark Tank) to get investment for a wobbly table stopper that can be slipped under tables which wobble, and it was a slice of plastic of varying thickness which you can carry on a keyring. He went on to make a million pounds after appearing on the show. Imagine this, he said, you’re at a bar, and your table is shaking; you call the wait staff, who brings over the stopper to steady the table; and then the wait staff places your drinks on it. Life is good.

A woman online was selling table poppers for shaking tables; they cost a nominal amount and were intended for people like me, who can carry around this tool for themselves. And then, there are Reddit threads and lengthy YouTube videos full of woodworking individuals doling out support advice, and the more theoretical among them recommending the wobbly table theorem in earnest. And the list goes on, and on.

Somewhere in my future, there is a white and grey stone cafe where sunlight pours in through the stained glass windows, and the roof is sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent to let the sky in. Here, people sit down at a table and talk about this and that over a cup of chai and sponge cake. There is movement of people, cups of chai and coffee, and delicious kheema served with flaky croissant. This is a place of repose and pause; of doodling and debate; of ideas and home to the irate.

Inside this cafe, engineering, carpentry, painting, cooking, and accounting have shaken hands over time to build a space where people can find reflection in raucous noise and quiet contemplation. To meet, drink an inexpensive beverage, and contemplate our collective existence has been at the epicentre of pushing humanity forward. That mathematicians, designers, and inventors continue to take an interest in how people gather and break the modern-day avocado toast is refreshing and inspiring. That fellow humans continue to hammer away their time and attention to improve the lives of others, the way we occupy spaces of conversation and conviviality reaffirms what it means to be alive.

Next time, I find a wobbling table, I’m going to move it less than 90 degrees or continue to tuck in a folded tissue under one of its legs. Next time, I am going to remember that when things are broken, a lot of people in our world are quietly working away on how to fix them.