Year to date, day ten

The first report of the year arrives with a year-to-date column in it, and the year to date is ten days old.

Ten days, and they are not ten of the same thing. One of them was a public holiday in Egypt and a working day everywhere else on the sheet. Three more were a weekend in one set of countries and a working day in the other, because the region keeps two weekends. Whatever survives that gets divided by last January, printed at the top of the page, and coloured.

The column is not there to inform anybody. Nobody builds a ten-day comparison in order to learn something from it.

It is there because it is an invitation, and in most rooms the loudest person accepts it before anyone else has finished reading. A number that small cannot be defended and cannot be dismissed. It has no shape yet, so whoever speaks first gives it one, and the hour goes wherever that person wanted the hour to go. Ahead of last year means the plan is working, in the second week of January. Behind means something must be done, urgently, about a month that has barely opened.

Everybody in the room knows the number means very little. That is not the problem. The problem is that nobody can prove it means very little, and an unprovable number is the exact condition in which the confident voice wins.

A report that leads with a ten-day year to date was written to alarm somebody or to reassure them, and which of the two was settled before the report existed. The version that would inform anyone is the last twelve weeks, and it never gets asked for, because twelve weeks includes December, and December has already been explained.