The ones who did not have to

The month that has just ended worked partly because of people who were under no obligation to make it work.

Somewhere inside every strong month there is a person in finance who released money in a day that normally takes nine. Somebody in the technology team who fixed a broken link at one in the morning. A dispatch that went out on a day the schedule said it would not, because a supervisor looked at it and decided it should. None of that sits in a process. None of it appears in a plan. Each one was a person choosing to care about a number that was not theirs to care about.

The campaign report is finished by now and it is accurate, and there is nothing in it about the warehouse. That is the part of a peak nobody writes down, and it is the part that decides the next one.

In September the same things will be needed again, from the same people, and whether they happen will not be settled by the plan. It will be settled by what those people concluded in April about whether anybody noticed.

A thank-you is cheap, and it is received as cheap, particularly by the person who lost the Friday. What is received differently is a change: the approval limit raised so that finance is not asked for a favour at midnight, the extra dispatch written into the schedule where it belongs, the link checked before the campaign goes out rather than after.

Almost nobody makes that change in April, because in April the work looks finished and the next peak is somebody else's problem.

The only thank-you that gets believed twice is the one that makes the favour unnecessary.