The reply comes at ten

The message arrives at one in the morning. The household is up, the plates are cleared, the phones are out, and somebody has a question about a size, or a total, or whether they deliver to the other side of the ring road.

It gets answered at ten, when the person who asked is asleep.

Nine hours, which in February would have been slow and forgivable. This month it is not nine hours. The question was asked at the end of one day and answered in the middle of the next, in the only stretch of the day the customer is not awake for. She reads it in the afternoon, if she reads it, by which time somebody else has already replied.

The advertising moved on the first night of the month. Somebody weighted the budget to the evening, pushed the schedule past eleven, turned the daytime down. That took an afternoon, and it happened because a media plan is a document with an owner, and the owner reads a calendar.

Nothing moved the answering, because the answering is not a document. It is whoever opens the laptop, at the hour they have always opened it, on a shift pattern written for a year when the day ran the other way round.

So the business is now running on two clocks. The one it bought and the one it answers on.

The customer never sees the first. She sees the interval between her question and the reply, and this month the business has quietly made that interval a day long without anybody deciding to.