This was not a story about blaming managers. It was about a workload too complex to verify perfectly through attention alone.
Calling the department-head review a sieve would be unfair. The real point was not that managers were careless; it was that attendance rules had become too complex for human attention to guarantee a perfect monthly review.
Clinical work continues on Sundays and public holidays. A person who works then may take substitute leave, but only within a defined period. A Sunday worked on April 5, for example, could create a leave window from March through June.
A request might be correct when approved and become wrong after illness, a family emergency, or a schedule swap. The manager had to verify not only whether the request made sense at the time, but whether the later work record still supported it.
I made no such mistakes while I was a department head—but my department had no Sunday or holiday work. In a department full of those cases, I might have gone mad too.
The answer was not to demand superhuman concentration. It was to build a process ordinary people could operate reliably.
CHAPTER 03 · PART 01 · EPISODE 4 / 6 STORIES · 35 STORIES TOTAL