The Favour on a Friday

Abstract

Work delivered and never written down is neither charged for nor received as a gift. It is twenty to six on a Friday, and the office of a structural engineering practice has mostly emptied for the weekend. An engineer in her sixth year is finishing her timesheet, the last thing she does every week, at a desk by the window where the last of the light has gone flat and grey over the car park. The project is an extension to a primary school: four classrooms and a hall, on a fixed fee agreed in the autumn. The timesheet has a row for the project and a row for "general office", and she is deciding which row this week belongs in. It was not a planned week. On Monday the architect moved one of the classrooms a metre and a half to save a tree, and the drainage layout had to be redrawn. On Wednesday the client's project manager rang to ask, kindly and apologetically, whether someone could come to site on Thursday, because the contractor had found an old culvert where the drawings showed none. She went.