Two Days Early

The delivery arrived on Wednesday morning, and it should have arrived on Friday. Nothing about it was wrong: the goods were the goods that had been ordered, the quantity was the quantity on the order, and the driver had the papers. It was simply two days early.

Ayla signed for it because there was no reason not to, and then spent the rest of the morning discovering what the two days meant. The store had space for the pallets only after the Thursday collection. The system would not accept a delivery against an order that was still open for another two days.

None of this was anybody’s fault. None of it was written down anywhere. The order, the collection and the system had been arranged one after another over eleven years, by people who had each solved the problem in front of them, and the arrangement had worked because deliveries came on Fridays.

Radek, who had been there longest, said that the same thing had happened once before, in a year he could not remember exactly, and that somebody had then written a note about it. Nobody could find the note. Ayla wrote a new one and put it where the orders were printed.

The useful part was not the note. It was that three people now knew why deliveries came on Fridays, which none of them had known on Tuesday, and which the supplier, who had moved the date to be helpful, had not known either.