Two lines for two nights

Somewhere in most marketing folders this week there is a greeting with no date on it.

The month is expected to begin around the middle of next week, depending on the sighting, so the first night is Tuesday or it is Wednesday, and nobody will know which until some time after sunset on one of them.

The greeting cannot wait for that. It went through approvals on Thursday, the last day anyone in Riyadh or Cairo was at a desk, and it is scheduled already for a night nobody can name.

So the line gets made safe for either. It names no night. It carries no verb with a time in it. Four people read it and each checked one thing, that it would not be wrong on Tuesday night and would not be wrong on Wednesday, and every pass took something else out.

That is the tell. A line that is true on either night is a line with the night removed, and the night was the only thing in it. What is left could have come from any company on any of three evenings, which is how it gets read.

The version that works costs twenty minutes more. Write two. One for Tuesday night, naming Tuesday night. One for Wednesday, naming Wednesday. Each is then allowed to say the thing only that evening allows: the announcement has just come, the shops on this street are still open, the first morning is tomorrow. Send whichever one the announcement makes true and delete the other.

Nobody does it, because a folder with two versions in it looks unfinished to the person signing, and safe looks finished.

A line built to survive either night was written before either night existed, and the reader can hear that it came from nobody in particular.