Exams run the office

Exams are on, and the meeting at four has quietly stopped existing.

Nobody announced it. The invitation still goes out. But two of the people who need to be in it are parents of a child sitting a paper in the morning, and from about three they are not really at the desk. One takes the call from a car. One replies to everything with a thumbs up and a promise to look at it properly tonight, and tonight is spent listening to revision read aloud.

So decisions slip a week. Nobody refused, and the work was not bad. The window in which a senior person reads something carefully closed at lunchtime, and nobody put that in writing anywhere.

A company calendar has a field for public holidays. It has nothing for the fortnight when the household reorganises itself around a timetable printed by a school. So the slippage arrives as a mystery and gets explained as one: the client went quiet, the approval is stuck, the team lost momentum.

I plan around it now, and it is not complicated. Anything that needs a careful read goes out in the morning. Nothing that matters is scheduled after three. Anything that needs two people to agree gets a week more than the calendar says it needs, and gets it before the papers start rather than in the middle of them.

For a fortnight in May the exam timetable outranks the operating calendar in every household in the building. A plan that ignores it is not late. It is planned on a household that does not exist in May.