The Other Side of the Rota

The woman handing out uniforms had once asked Dina for a Saturday off. Dina remembered refusing. She did not remember why, which made the recognition worse.

“Medium?” the woman asked.

“Probably.”

Anita held the jacket against her. “Try it. These come up small.”

There was no warmth in her voice, but no open hostility either. Dina put on the jacket. It fitted. Her name, written on a temporary badge, looked unfamiliar without a title beneath it.

For fourteen years she had supervised production at a small food-packing company. She managed rotas, targets and the ordinary friction between the two. When the company closed, she discovered that being experienced in a particular building did not guarantee anyone wanted her experience elsewhere.

At forty-eight she had a mortgage, a son finishing college and a savings account becoming less theoretical every week. She took agency work in a linen warehouse that supplied hotels. Three weeks initially. Mornings and some evenings. Enough to stop the savings shrinking quite so quickly.

She expected to find the work beneath her. She was ashamed of the expectation before the first shift began.

Anita showed her the storage aisles, the packing benches and the board listing deliveries. She had left Dina’s old company five years earlier. Dina knew this from a resignation letter she barely remembered reading.

“Questions go to the shift lead,” Anita said. “That’s me until ten. Then Marcus.”

Dina nodded. She could learn a system. Systems were what she did.

By eleven she had sent the wrong size of tablecloth to the wrong bench and needed help locating a trolley everyone else seemed able to find by instinct. By lunchtime her shoulders hurt. She ate alone in the break room, trying not to look as though she was reviewing the organisation.

A young worker called Reza sat opposite her. He asked where she had worked before. She told him, leaving out her role.

“Anita was there,” he said.

“I know.”

“She’s good. She knows where everything disappears.”

For a moment Dina nearly said she had trained her. It was not even true. Anita had learned her job from another operator. Dina had signed the training sheet.

She drank her tea.

That Friday she found an old office notebook in her handbag. The pages contained targets, meeting times and names shortened to initials. She could identify the production lines more easily than the people whose shifts she had moved between them. At the back was a note about her son’s school concert: ask someone else to cover. She had forgotten whether she went.

She wanted to blame the company. It had demanded more work from fewer people each year. That was true. It was also true that she sometimes enjoyed being the one who decided whose difficulty mattered. Understanding the pressure did not require pretending she had possessed no choices inside it.

At home she put the notebook in a drawer and checked the new rota. There was a free evening she had not noticed. She called her son and asked whether he wanted dinner. When he said he already had plans, she did not sound wounded or ask him to rearrange them. They chose another day. It was a small conversation, but she heard how different it was from the ones she had been having with him for years.

At the end of the first week, Anita pointed out two errors on Dina’s packing records. They were small, but needed correcting before the next shift used them. Dina began explaining that the form was poorly laid out.

Anita waited.

“I’ll fix them,” Dina said.

“Thank you. And if the form’s confusing, show Marcus. We’ve changed it before.”

There was no lecture. Dina found herself rehearsing one anyway, drawing on years of delivering them to other people.

On Sunday her son asked whether the job was all right. She said it was temporary. He asked whether that meant it wasn’t all right.

“It means I haven’t decided how to describe it.”

He laughed. “You could start with towels.”

She told him about the tablecloths. He told her about an assignment he had submitted with the wrong file attached. For once they spoke as two people learning things rather than a mother asking whether her son had made enough effort.

During the second week, a large hotel changed its order with very little notice. The warehouse grew tense. Marcus moved people between benches. Anita stayed late. Dina watched the rota become a set of names dragged towards a problem, and knew exactly how easy it was to stop imagining the people attached to them.

At four, Marcus asked Reza to stay until eight. Reza said he could stay until six. Marcus sighed and asked whether he was serious about keeping the job.

Dina looked down at her work. She had used almost those words. She could hear herself saying them with weary reasonableness, as though a person’s plans outside the building were an inconvenience they had invented to obstruct her.

Reza stayed quiet. Anita was on the phone.

“He said six,” Dina heard herself say. “Could I cover the later part?”

Marcus looked at her. “Can you manage that bench alone?”

She could not. Not yet.

“With a handover,” she said. “If someone shows me the part I haven’t done.”

They found an arrangement. It was not elegant. It got the order out. Reza left at six, thanking her on the way past. She wanted to tell him she was not rescuing him. She had simply been available when somebody else wasn’t. Instead she said goodnight and checked the list again.

After the shift, Anita walked with her to the bus stop.

“You could have let Marcus work it out,” she said.

“I nearly did.”

Anita nodded.

For several minutes they watched traffic. Then Dina asked about the Saturday she had refused years earlier. Did Anita remember it?

“Which one?”

The answer was not cruel. That was what hurt.

Dina described what little she recalled: a summer order, staff shortages, Anita waiting beside the office door. Anita remembered. Her sister was moving out of a difficult marriage. She had promised to help with the children.

“I didn’t tell you all that,” Anita said. “I didn’t think I should have to.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“You said everyone had problems.”

The bus arrived before Dina could find a sentence large enough. They boarded separately. She spent the journey looking at her reflection in the window, seeing an ordinary tired woman and wondering how long she had mistaken that appearance for an excuse.

The following morning she apologised. Briefly, before the shift, without asking Anita to recall more examples for her benefit.

“I treated being short-staffed as permission to stop listening,” she said. “I know an apology doesn’t give you that Saturday back.”

Anita put her bag in the locker.

“No. It doesn’t.”

Dina accepted the answer. They went to work.

At the end of the third week, the agency offered another month. Dina asked whether the evening hours could be confirmed farther ahead. The coordinator said demand varied. Dina nearly apologised for asking. Then she requested the information they could give and wrote down what remained uncertain.

She had once assumed flexibility cost nothing unless someone made a fuss. Now she could identify its price in missed buses, cancelled plans and meals eaten standing up.

She stayed for the extra month. She learned the warehouse properly, including the things no printed system captured: which client used an old description for a new size, which trolley needed attention, who knew how to clarify an order without turning the question into an argument.

Anita was especially good at the last part.

When Marcus asked Dina to review a packing form because of her previous experience, she began alone. After fifteen minutes she took it to Reza and asked him to show her where he hesitated when filling it out. He pointed to a box she had thought perfectly obvious.

“It could mean either thing,” he said.

She looked again. It could.

They made a draft together and tried it at one bench. It improved one problem and introduced another. Dina revised it without announcing that the trial had failed. By Friday the form was clearer. Nobody congratulated her on rediscovering how to ask questions. People simply used it.

In April a permanent stock-control role became available. It paid less than her old job, more than the agency work, and involved keeping orders and records aligned. She wanted to apply. She also dreaded being rejected by people who had watched her struggle with tablecloths.

She asked Anita whether she thought the application was reasonable.

“Yes,” Anita said. “You know the work now.”

“Would it be awkward?”

“You’d be a colleague. You are already.”

Dina filled out the application honestly. At the interview Marcus asked what she would change. She named the planning issue she actually understood and said which people she would consult before suggesting a new arrangement.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Probably. I haven’t seen every shift.”

There was a time she would have considered that answer weak. Now it seemed accurate.

She got the job. On the first day of the permanent contract, the woman in the uniform room gave her a badge without an expiry date. Dina put it on, noticing that it still carried no title worth using to explain herself at dinner.

Her son bought a small cake to celebrate. He wrote WELL DONE MUM on the box because the shop would charge to pipe it on the icing. Dina admired his financial judgement and ate two slices.

At work, things did not become easy. There were late orders, short tempers and a week when half the expected delivery arrived at once. Once she snapped at Reza, caught herself and apologised before the end of the conversation. He did not need a speech about how much she had changed. He needed the correct stock figure.

Anita remained reserved. Some days they ate lunch together. Other days Anita sat with people she had known for years. Dina stopped treating every small kindness as a measure of forgiveness.

In June, Anita asked for a Thursday off. The request went to Marcus, not Dina, but the shift needed cover from someone familiar with a particular order. Dina checked her calendar before offering. Her son’s presentation was that evening. She could cover the morning and early afternoon, not the whole shift.

They arranged the rest between three people. Nobody had to provide a tragic reason to deserve the hours away.

On Thursday Anita left at noon carrying a bag with a birthday card visible in the top. At the door she turned back.

“Thanks, Dina.”

“Have a good afternoon.”

Dina returned to the stock sheet. At three she handed over properly, changed out of her jacket and caught the bus to her son’s college. She arrived early enough to sit near the front.

When he saw her, he lifted a hand. She lifted hers back. The warehouse would continue without her for a few hours. She knew the names of the people making that possible, and this time she had thanked them before leaving.