Field note · 27 August 2026
What to carry into the sitting
The folio is already drawn when you arrive. What you bring into the room decides whether the hour changes anything.
The folio is finished when you sit down. The sitting is not a second analysis performed while you watch. It is the hour in which the people who must act hear the reading and decide what they will do with it. What you carry through the door matters more than what you wear.
Bring the person who can change the thing the questionnaire was about. At a riverside inn, that was the breakfast cook as well as the manager. A plate about eggs is decoration if the cook is not in the room. At a school open evening, the registrar needed the teacher who actually stood at the door and handed parents the form. Without that teacher we could not tell whether the low return from one year group was sulkiness or a form that never left the table.
Leave the full tally bundle in the folder unless a particular card is needed to settle a dispute. Bring one sentence: the decision you hope to make before you stand up. "Whether to keep the new breakfast hour" is a decision. "To understand our guests better" is a mood, and a mood will spend the two hours wandering.
Also bring a disagreement if you have one. The sittings that earn their fee are often the ones where someone says the cards do not match what they hear at the desk. We then look at who was handed a form and who was not. A night manager who never offers the card will not see his shift in the pile, and he will be right to distrust it. That mismatch is a finding, not an embarrassment to be smoothed over before we arrive.
If you need the plates at your own premises, say so when you book. Our room on Nimitrmai Road has paper on a stand and a lamp, and eight chairs that are actually used. We can carry the same plates to an address in Bangkok. What we cannot carry is your decision-maker. If that person can only spare twenty minutes, tell us before the day, and we will cut the order of the reading to the decision, not to the full folio. The rest can be read on paper afterwards. Pretending a twenty-minute visit is a sitting helps no one, and we would rather reset the hour than rush the plates past the only person who can act.