Last month at Tuesday game night, mid setup for Spirit Island, one of our regulars insisted a specific rule interaction was ambiguous, something about whether a certain power triggers before or after a particular phase resolves. I said it wasn’t ambiguous at all, it was just written the way rulebooks get written when the designer assumed you’d read the whole document once before playing instead of skimming to the part you needed. And then, because apparently I can’t help myself, I pulled up the actual text on my phone and walked through it the same way I’d walk a councilmember through why a bus route change won’t actually break their commute, cite the specific clause, show the upstream dependency, land on the answer everyone can verify themselves instead of just trusting me.

This is the part of my job that apparently doesn’t turn off at five o’clock. Transportation planning is, underneath the parts people actually see, an enormous exercise in reading documents precisely, a route isn’t ambiguous once you’ve actually traced every stop against the schedule data, it just looks ambiguous to someone who hasn’t. I spend real chunks of my week doing exactly the thing I did at that table, taking something that feels like a judgment call to everyone in the room and showing it’s actually just an unread instruction.

A coworker once told me I “argue rules like I’m defending a budget line item,” which I took as a compliment even though I don’t think she meant it as one. It’s not wrong. I genuinely enjoy the moment in a rules dispute where you can point at the exact sentence and the argument just ends, the same satisfaction as finding the specific data point that ends a city council debate about whether a route actually needs more service. Both jobs, and I do think of the games as a kind of second, lower stakes job some nights, reward the same instinct: don’t guess, go look.

Where this gets me in trouble is when I’m wrong, because I argue with the same confidence whether I’ve actually checked or not, and my partner has started asking “did you look it up or are you just sure” before I’m allowed to win an argument at the table. Fair. I lost a whole afternoon once insisting a card interaction worked a certain way in Dune Imperium because it matched how a similar mechanic worked in a different game, which turned out to be exactly the wrong instinct, the two systems just looked similar on the surface and worked completely differently underneath, the board game equivalent of assuming two bus routes with the same number in different cities must run the same way.

I don’t think this instinct is going anywhere. If anything it’s gotten worse since I started tracking my reading log by hand, cross referencing which reviewer complaints in a rulebook thread turn out to be real bugs versus people who just didn’t read carefully. The job followed me home a long time ago. I’ve mostly made peace with it, mostly, some nights I just want to play the game and not litigate it, and I’m working on knowing the difference between those two nights before I open my mouth.