Half the team will be fasting

Saudi Arabia has a public holiday on Saturday. Founding Day, the twenty-second.

If you work in Riyadh or Jeddah it lands on a weekend day this year and mostly disappears into it. If you work in London it never appeared at all, because it is not in the holiday list the calendar was set up with, and a day that is not in the list is not a day.

That one is survivable. Nobody has to plan around a holiday that falls on a Saturday.

The next one is not. Ramadan is expected to begin around the start of March, which is roughly ten days away. For a month after that, half of a team spread between London or Dubai and Cairo or Riyadh will not eat or drink between dawn and sunset. They will be sharp late at night and at their worst somewhere between three and five in the afternoon. The other half will keep booking the three o'clock call, because three o'clock is a reasonable hour in the city where the working week was designed.

I have sat on both sides of this. The work that fixes it is arithmetic, and it has to be done before the month starts rather than in the second week. Standing meetings moved into the morning overlap. Deadlines lifted off the last ten days. One person named for anything that has to be decided after sunset. The holiday list corrected by somebody who lives here.

A meeting invite is a small document carrying a large claim. It says which city the company believes it lives in. In a month when half of it is fasting, that is not a scheduling detail. It is the culture, written down, half an hour at a time.