Whoever is at their desk

The UAE is off today and tomorrow, and from here the region's calendars stop overlapping until the new year.

Dubai pauses now. Bahrain pauses on the sixteenth and seventeenth, Qatar on the eighteenth. The head offices in London and further away go quiet from about the twenty-fourth. Egypt's next day off is in January. Saudi Arabia does not stop at all. For a month, every week has a different set of chairs empty, and it is never the same set twice.

The work does not wait for the overlap. December is when next year's budget gets its last signature, when the agency contract renews, when the January creative is approved, when the Ramadan brief has to leave the building. Each of those has a date, and each date falls inside somebody's holiday.

So each one is taken by whoever is at their desk.

Nothing about this is dishonest. The person present is usually senior enough to sign, and the thing needed signing. What I have never seen, in any company, is a record of who was absent. The minutes list the attendees. The approval carries a name. No document anywhere says that the Saudi lead approved the UAE plan because the UAE lead was on the Corniche, or that Cairo fixed the January dates because London had gone quiet, or that a finance director signed the Ramadan brief because the marketing director had flown.

The org chart says who decides. For one month a year the calendar says who decided, and only one of those two documents is read afterwards.

By January the December decisions look like decisions. They have signatures and they are in the plan. What they lack is a note of who was in the country when they were made, and without it a month of decision rights handed out by rota reads, forever after, as a month of decisions made by role.

The calendar was the org chart. It just never printed one.