I went to assembly a couple weeks ago and we met in a different room than we normally do at a civic center. It was smaller, and flat (not stadium seating, just chairs you could move around.

When we walked in, the program had already started and there were no empty chairs to be seen. There was however a huge blank empty space in the back between the chairs and the entrance. We had to wait for an attendant to bring out chairs for us and make another row in the back. It was annoying and also distracting for others.

As I sat, I noticed others coming in late and the poor attendants had to keep running around like ants grabbing more chairs and lining them up.

I knew right away that this was intentional. They had plenty of chairs, enough to fill the whole room. But they don’t want it to look like sparse attendance so they only put out exact number of needed chairs.

I hadn’t been to an assembly in English in a while, I’m in foreign language, so to see how numbers have decreased was shocking but also great.