Flows do not read the calendar

Commemoration Day in the UAE falls on a Sunday this year, a weekend day in Dubai and an ordinary working day in Riyadh and Cairo, where a good many of the teams running UAE accounts actually sit.

Most of those teams now know the rule. It is a day of remembrance rather than a holiday, and the promotional campaign is paused for it. The posts come down, the offer creative stops. Somebody went through the calendar in October and put a line through the thirtieth, and that line is a decision a person made.

What nobody paused is the flow.

The abandoned-basket email does not know what day it is. Neither does the browse reminder. The win-back sequence that fires forty days after a last order was built in August by someone who may have left the building, and it will fire today, into the UAE, at the usual hour, with the usual subject line about not missing out.

The campaign is paused because a person looked at the calendar. The flows are running because nobody looks at the flows. They are triggered by behaviour, and behaviour did not stop. Somebody in Abu Dhabi opened the app last night; somebody always does.

Look at it from where she is sitting. A quiet Sunday, a day the country has set aside, and a brand she quite liked has just told her the basket she left is about to expire. Nobody wrote it to offend. It lands as oblivious all the same, and oblivious lasts longer than rude, because rude at least noticed her.

Running consumer brands from the Gulf, I keep a list of days the flows must not fire, and it is a different list from the days the campaigns must not run. The campaign list is short and everyone knows it. The flow list is longer, because a flow needs no reason to send, only a trigger, and a trigger observes nothing.

The calendar was paused by a person. The flow was written in August and has not looked up since.