Answering on the seventh

The seventh of January is a public holiday in Egypt. Coptic Christmas. The banks are shut, the schools are shut, the city moves slowly, and the messages arrive anyway.

They come from head offices and agencies where the calendar in use has never had the seventh on it. Nobody is being rude. That calendar was drawn in a country with other holidays and went into the shared system unchanged, so on the file this is a Wednesday, and a Wednesday gets an answer.

So the desk in Cairo answers. Not because anyone asked, and not because the work could not have waited a day. It answers because a market that is visibly off is a market that gets planned around, and a market that is quietly available is a market that gets planned with. Everybody who has worked in a smaller office knows the distance between those two sentences. Being out of the room costs more than being out of bed.

I have watched it in every seat I have sat in, and I have done it myself, more than once, on a day my own country had given me.

It reads as diligence. The truer word is a tax. The smaller market pays it in hours, on days its own country has set aside, for a seat at a table where its holidays are not entries. The bill appears nowhere. There is no line for it in a budget, no box for it in a review, and no way to raise it without sounding as though the work matters less here, which is the one thing nobody in a regional office is going to risk saying.

And the calendar never gets corrected, because the answer always arrives on time.