Minutes of the concert committee, Tuesday evening. Present: four teachers and two pupils.
The hall was measured last week. With the aisles the fire officer requires, it holds at most one hundred and eighty people. That number was written at the top of the board and nobody argued with it.
The second number came from the treasurer. Chairs must be hired from the town at five dollars each, and the whole budget for the evening is eight hundred dollars. Eight hundred divided by five is one hundred and sixty, and there the plan stopped.
The room allows a hundred and eighty. The money allows a hundred and sixty. Both limits are real, and the smaller one is the one that decides. Twenty seats the hall would happily hold will stand empty because nobody can pay for them. The committee agreed to print one hundred and sixty tickets and to keep forty of those for families, which is a third limit and, as it happens, not a binding one — forty is comfortably inside a hundred and sixty.
Any real plan is a small pile of conditions like these, all true at once. A choice is only workable if it survives every one of them, and the interesting part is almost never a single condition. It is finding which of them is actually holding the plan back — and, sometimes, discovering that the one everybody was arguing about was not.