After the summer is a rank

From about the middle of June the same sentence comes back on everything. Let us pick this up after the summer.

It arrives politely, and it is not a refusal. Nobody argues with it. The person saying it really is about to be away, and the person waiting really can wait three weeks.

It is also a ranking, published for free.

Watch the same fortnight. Some meetings get moved to September. Some get squeezed into a Tuesday morning before a Thursday flight. A supplier who has been waiting six weeks for a decision gets one on the way to the airport, and another gets the polite sentence.

Nobody decided this. There is no list. But every diary in the region is being triaged against a hard stop right now, and triage says out loud what a friendly email does not.

A retailer will tell you all year that your line matters. The week before the buyer leaves for the summer will tell you whether it matters more than the other four things on the desk.

I read my own place the same way. When three of four open conversations come back as after the summer, that is not a diary problem. It is information about where I sit in four different queues, and it costs nothing to collect.

The usual response is to treat the deferral as an appointment, and to send an invitation for the second week of September. The invitation is not the difficulty. Nothing has been declined. It is that the thing on the other side of the summer was never a date to begin with.

After the summer is a rank. June is the one month of the year that reads it out.