Asking Which Days Somebody Works

Why it gets skipped

Partly because it feels like a strange question. Everybody knows what a working week is, and asking looks either pedantic or faintly insulting, as though you suspect them of idleness.

Partly because the first few exchanges with a new counterparty are spent on the thing itself — the price, the specification, the scope — and the calendar feels like administration to be settled later. By the time it matters, a date has already been agreed on an assumption.

And partly because the assumption is invisible. Nobody consciously decides that the other side works Monday to Friday. It is simply what a week is, until a Thursday afternoon request gets no answer for four days.

How to ask without it being strange

The phrasing that works puts the question on your side rather than theirs.

So that I do not send you things on your weekend — which days of the week does your office work, and is there anything in the next couple of months that closes you?

Framed that way it is a courtesy, and people answer it readily and often at length. They will tell you about the Thursday half-day, the plant shutdown in August, the week at the end of the quarter when the whole finance team is unavailable, and the fact that the one person who signs the certificates is part-time on Wednesdays.

None of that would have appeared in any calendar tool.

What to do with the answer

Write it somewhere a person will look, not somewhere a person could look.

The usual failure is recording it in the thread where it was said. Six weeks later a different colleague agrees a date with the same counterparty and has no idea the thread exists. The useful place is wherever that counterparty's details already live — the supplier record, the project page, the first line of the shared document — and the useful form is two lines.

That last row matters more than it looks. Working weeks change, holiday calendars are annual, and a note with no date on it gets trusted long after it stopped being true.

The second question is the one that pays

Working days are stable and are usually guessed roughly right within a day either way. Holidays are not guessable at all.

A public holiday in a country you do not operate in is completely invisible from here. It does not appear in your calendar, your colleagues have never heard of it, and it removes between one and ten working days from a window you have already promised somebody else. The panel above has one of those in it, and it cost a fortnight.

They are also entirely knowable. Every such holiday was published the previous year. The information is free and sitting on a government page, and the only reason it causes trouble is that nobody thinks to look for a thing they do not know exists.

When you cannot ask

Sometimes there is nobody to ask — a regulator, a port, a bank's clearing cycle, a counterparty who simply does not answer that kind of question.

Then the fallback is observation. Note the timestamps on what they send. Three or four messages are enough to show which days they are at their desk and roughly which hours, and a fortnight of them will show a weekend. It is slower and less reliable than asking, and it is much better than assuming.

What this does not fix

Knowing their week does not shorten anything. The drawing still takes nine calendar days; the certificate still takes six.

What it changes is that the nine days stop being a surprise, which means they can be promised accurately to whoever is waiting at the far end. Most of the damage done by the other side's calendar is not the delay itself but the commitment made in ignorance of it, and that part is avoidable for the price of one question.

When the answer changes

Working weeks are stable and they are not permanent, and the changes arrive without announcement.

A company acquired by another frequently inherits the buyer's calendar within a year. An office that moves country changes its week entirely. A plant that goes from five days to six, or back, does so for commercial reasons nobody outside hears about. A key person going part-time changes the availability of a signature without changing anything about the organisation.

None of these is communicated to customers or suppliers, because from inside they are internal matters.

The signal is usually a date that behaves unexpectedly: an answer that arrives on a day nothing used to arrive, or a silence on a day that used to be reliable. One line — "has your week changed? I had you down as Sunday to Thursday" — settles it, and it is the kind of question people enjoy answering.