The night shift nobody invoiced

The retainer was priced for a working day.

Somebody built that fee out of hours: a number of posts, two rounds of amends, a report, a call, all of it between nine and six. For eleven months of the year the arithmetic is roughly honest.

Then the month arrives and the day inverts. The audience is awake from sunset until two. The community manager answers at eleven at night because that is when the questions come. The client sends a change at one, which is a reasonable hour for him, because that is when he is awake. A price on a post is wrong and the branch has opened, so it gets fixed in the ten minutes before sunset by somebody whose own family is sitting down.

The last ten nights are starting about now, depending on when the month began, and that stretch is where most of it goes.

None of this is in the scope. All of it happens, because nobody wants to be the agency that met the biggest month of a client's year with a change order, and because the people doing it are generous, and because it is only a month.

Then consider what the free thing costs. The client did not take a night shift from anyone. He was never sent an invoice for one, so in the paperwork of both companies it did not occur, which means it will not be in next year's fee either. The month gets priced again in December as a working day.

The bill is real, and it comes in April, and not in money. It comes as the person who carried the account through the month and is gone by May, and as a handover the client is told to read as a career move.

Generosity nobody records is not generosity. It is a subsidy, and the account team pays it.