Explaining June to head office

In most of the cities where head offices sit, June is a good month. Someone there opens the regional report, sees the Gulf number turning down in the second week of June, and reads it the only way that desk allows. Something is wrong with the team.

Nothing is wrong with the team. The Eid was on the sixth, the schools are about to close, and the families who can leave are leaving. The customer is at the airport, and the dashboard cannot see the airport.

But that sentence does not travel. From here the summer is obvious the way weather is obvious. From a desk where June is peak it reads as an excuse, because it is arriving with the number instead of ahead of it, and anything that arrives with a bad number is an excuse by definition.

So for about six weeks the regional lead's real job is not the number. The number is doing what it does every year. The job is translation, upward, in the language head office already uses: which weeks are dead and which are only quiet, what the same weeks did last year, what the September return looks like, and why the annual number was always going to be made in the autumn and the spring.

I have written that translation from the platform side, where a great many accounts doing the same thing at once make it plainly the market, and from the operating side, where one number makes it feel personal. What separates the two readings is the date on the email.

A warning about the Gulf summer sent in June is an excuse. The same warning sent in January, with the phasing built around it, is a plan. The region is never judged on its summer. It is judged on whether anyone was told, and when.