An office closes at noon on a Friday in May. Half the team has taken the day off, the rest are heading to a summer lunch, and somebody has taped a note to the door on the way out. At ten past two a customer calls. The agent answers, polite and correct, and tells her the office is open until four, and that she is welcome to try again in an hour.
Nothing has failed. The agent read the opening hours it was given when it was set up, and they were right on the day someone typed them in.
The only thing in the setup that goes wrong by itself
The rest of the configuration holds. What the agent is allowed to promise, when it transfers, the register it answers in – all of it stays put until somebody decides otherwise. The opening line is the same today as it was yesterday, unless someone has rewritten it.
Opening hours are not like that. They become untrue because the calendar moves around them: bridge days between a public holiday and the weekend, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, a moving day, a day half the staff are on a course. None of those feel like a change to a system. They feel like a message you pass on to whoever needs to know.
The door gets the message. The website usually gets it. The phone almost never does, because the phone has never been something you had to tell things to.
