Two holiday calendars

A brand runs two holiday calendars and only one of them ever gets printed.

The holiday just gone landed on a Saturday, which was generous of it. Most of them fall in the working week.

The first calendar is the content one. On it a public holiday is a post, a colour, an approval and a scheduled time. It is built in a marketing team in December, in a spreadsheet with a row per week, and every entry on it is something the brand intends to say.

The second belongs to nobody, which is why it is not a document at all. On it the same holiday is a day when the courier network runs a fraction of its drivers, the banks do not settle, the customs desk is shut, the warehouse has two people in it instead of nine, and the support line is one person answering from a phone at their family's house. Every entry on that calendar is something the brand will quietly fail to do.

The two meet on the first working morning afterwards, and not in a meeting. They meet in the queue: where is my order, why has my refund not come back, why did nobody answer for two days, why did the site promise delivery on a day when nothing in the country was moving.

The site promised it because the checkout was written by somebody reading the first calendar. A delivery promise is a marketing decision that gets paid for in operations, and the bill arrives about seventy-two hours after the post did.

One of those two calendars was written by a person who had to deliver something. That is the one the customer remembers, and it is the one almost nobody in the room has ever seen.