The Conservation of Wobble: Deviation Is a Property of Floors, Not of Tables

A table wobbles, someone folds a napkin under the short leg, and the wobble stops. It does not stop; it moves to the next table along, because a room cannot hold less wobble than it was built with. Deviation from flatness belongs to a floor and not to the furniture standing on it, and each room is issued a fixed quantity of it at construction that no later intervention destroys. Shimming redistributes that quantity; it does not spend it. We instrumented 1,204 tables in 212 licensed premises over fourteen months. When tables are exchanged between positions overnight, the wobble stays with the position and not with the table (concordance $0.94$, 95% CI $0.91$–$0.96$). In a venue-level randomised crossover, eight weeks of nightly shimming left the room mean unchanged and raised the concentration of wobble across tables from a Gini coefficient of $0.61$ to $0.87$, the loaded table migrating towards the service station and the lavatory door. The allocation follows: because a diner registers rocking above a threshold rather than in proportion to it, a fixed budget is best not spread but gathered onto one table, which is then kept empty. Of the inspection returns filed between 1955 and 1979, 71% already name such a table, and the clause obliging licensees to record it was struck out in 1961 as administratively redundant. You cannot fix a wobbly table. You can only choose whose it is.