The HR calendar

The holiday list comes round from human resources once a year. One page, a table of dates, a column of countries.

In most regional companies that page is the marketing calendar. Somebody copies it into the plan, arranges the campaigns around the gaps, and the year has a rhythm.

Look at what it says about today. The twenty-third of July, Egypt closed, one day. That is accurate. It is accurate about the office.

Today is a Thursday, and the Egyptian weekend is Friday and Saturday, so nobody buying anything in Egypt has one day off. They have three, and it is the last long stretch of unhurried time before the schools go back.

The plan does not know that, because the plan inherited the office version of the week. The sends get paused this morning out of respect and go out again on Sunday, by which time the customer is on the road home. The paid media paces flat across a weekend that is three days long. The delivery promise assumes a network that today has a fraction of its drivers out, so the box ordered last night lands on Sunday and reads as slow. The replies stop, and a message arriving this evening waits sixty hours for an answer, which the sender experiences as being ignored.

Name the one person the plan is supposed to be for. She is on the desert road this morning with the boot full, or she is at home in Cairo with three days and a phone, looking at things late at night with nobody asking anything of her. Either way she is more available to a brand today than on any working Tuesday of the year, and today the brand is shut.

Human resources decides when the staff are off. Nobody in the building decides when the customer is off, because the document the plan copied was written for payroll, about people who were never the audience.