There was no vote. No election. No moment where anyone asked, "hey, would you like to take on this responsibility?" I did not raise my hand. I did not submit an application.
One ordinary day, I simply appeared in an email CC list, freshly labeled "fun committee." Fully formed. Reassigned by unseen forces. And with that title came the actual job: I am now in charge of ordering birthday cakes for the entire office.
This is how it works, apparently. Corporate conscription. They don't recruit you to the fun committee, they sentence you to it, and you find out via reply-all.
For a while I resisted internally. Plotted my escape. Then I made peace with it, because there's no fighting the fun committee — the fun committee is forever. Once you're the cake person, you are the cake person until you resign or die.
But I did extract one small victory from the situation. I renegotiated the bakery. The old one was expensive and dry. I found a better one, cheaper, actually moist. So if I must be the unwilling architect of everyone's birthday celebration, at least the cake is genuinely good now.
Small wins. That's committee life. Nobody asked me to be here, but the sponge is better than it's ever been, and that's my legacy.