The journey
The day the trains were out
A two-hour-forty journey to a building that produced nothing, and the reason the day happened anyway.
Days this part is about, hour by hour
Tuesday, the first week
1 of 7One hour that had been going round in writing for a fortnight
Tuesday, the fifth week
0 of 7Wednesday, the fifth week
2 of 7three days · 21 hours logged · three of them were only possible there · one of the three days contained no such hour at all · three were made worse by being there
Three days, two of which repaid the journey and one of which did not.
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Engineering works on the line. The replacement bus added thirty-five minutes each way, so the journey came to two hours and forty minutes door to door instead of two hours and ten.
The day itself produced no hour that required the building. It was a Tuesday, three of the team were in, none of them were the three this work touched, and the one meeting in the calendar was with two people in another city.
It is the worst-value trip in the record, and the interesting part is why it was made.
Why the day happened
Not stubbornness. The reasoning, as it ran at half past six that morning:
- The policy requires three days, and this week two of them had already gone — one to a client visit, one to a day at home with a delivery.
- Missing this one would mean one office day in the week, which would be noticed, or would at least feel as though it might be.
- There was no information available about whether the day would be worth it, because there never is.
- The engineering works were known about but were not a reason, since the rule says nothing about how long the journey takes.
Every step correct. The outcome: two hours and forty minutes of travel for seven hours of work that was identical to the same seven hours at a kitchen table, plus one call taken on a bus.
What the rule contributed
The rule made the journey mandatory and the content irrelevant. Those are the same property viewed twice: a requirement expressed as a count of days cannot distinguish a day worth two hours and forty minutes of travel from a day worth none, because it does not look at the day at all.
It also made the decision defensive. The question that morning was not "will this be a useful day" but "will not going be a problem". A rule that counts attendance converts every marginal day into that second question, and the second question has a predictable answer when there is no way to demonstrate the first.
What a different rule would have produced
Under a named Wednesday with no count, this Tuesday would simply not have happened. Nothing would have been lost — the day produced nothing — and two hours and forty minutes would have been returned.
Under a count with an explicit exception for disrupted travel, the day would also not have happened, but somebody would have had to ask, which on a Tuesday morning at six-thirty is a message nobody sends.
The general version
The cost of a journey varies a great deal and the value of a day varies a great deal, and a rule written in days cannot see either.
Most of the time the variance is small enough to ignore. On the days when it is not — the strike, the works, the week that already went sideways — the rule produces exactly the wrong answer, and it produces it confidently, because the rule has no way of knowing it is being asked a question it cannot answer.
The decision, as it would have gone under three rules
The same morning, the same disruption, three different policies:
Under a count of three days. The day happens. The rule says three, two are already gone, and there is no mechanism that takes the journey into account. Two hours and forty minutes of travel for nothing.
Under a count with a written exception for disrupted travel. The day probably still happens, because the exception has to be invoked, and invoking it at half past six in the morning means messaging somebody who is asleep about a thing you might be judged for. On this record nobody ever used an exception of this kind, and two people believed one existed.
Under a named day with no count. The day simply does not occur. It was a Tuesday; the named day was Wednesday; nothing was lost, because the day produced nothing.
The third is not more lenient. It is less bureaucratic, and it reaches the right answer without anybody having to ask for anything.
Why written exceptions underperform
They look like the obvious fix and they consistently disappoint, for a reason that is about who has to use them.
An exception must be invoked, which means a request, which means a small judgement about whether invoking it looks like reluctance. The people most affected by a hard journey are often the people least willing to spend that judgement, and the ones who use exceptions most freely are usually those who need them least.
So an exception process redistributes the benefit towards the confident and leaves the original problem in place for everybody else, while allowing the arrangement to be described as flexible.
The general lesson
A rule that cannot see the thing that varies will give the wrong answer confidently whenever that thing varies a lot. Journeys vary a lot — across people, across days, across weeks with engineering works in them — and a count of days cannot see any of it.
Adding exceptions does not give the rule sight. It adds a channel through which somebody can report what the rule cannot see, at a cost that falls on them.