The New Colleague

Yusuf Kaya had worked in the print room at Ardley College for eleven years. He knew where everything was, which was not the same as saying that everything was tidy. Paper lived in stacks that only he could read, and the counter was covered in small yellow notes.

In September he was told that a second person had been appointed. "You've been asking for help since 2019," his manager said. Yusuf had asked for help. He had not asked for a colleague, and he understood, a little too late, that these were two different things.

Nadia Frost arrived on a Monday with her own scissors and a box of coloured labels. She was thirty-four, she had run a print shop in Cardiff for six years, and she said hello to every student who came through the door before Yusuf had even looked up.

By Wednesday the yellow notes were gone. In their place stood four trays: waiting, printing, done, problems. "Nothing's lost," Nadia said. "It's just somewhere with a name now." Yusuf smiled at her and then spent the evening looking for an order he had put down that morning.

The trouble was that she wasn't wrong. Orders that used to sit for two days were finished by lunch. Students who would once have been told to come back tomorrow were handed their work at the counter. Yusuf watched all this and felt something that was not quite pleasure.

He didn't argue. He simply kept a second system in his head, the old one, and used it whenever Nadia was at lunch. Twice she came back to find the trays half empty and the paper stacked in the old way against the wall, in the order that only he understood.

"You moved them back," she said on the Friday. "I know where they are," said Yusuf. "So do I, when they're in the trays." She wasn't angry, which was worse. She went to lunch and left the paper exactly where he had stacked it, and she said nothing about it again.

The concert programmes came in on the last Tuesday of term. The music department wanted six hundred, folded, by Thursday morning. At four in the afternoon Yusuf discovered that the file which had been sent to them was the wrong version, with last year's date on the front.

If he had been alone, he would have stayed until midnight and printed the wrong thing anyway. Instead Nadia rang the department, found somebody who was still in the building, had the right file within twenty minutes and wrote the job number on a green card in the printing tray.

They worked until nine. Nadia folded while Yusuf fed the machine, and when it jammed for the third time he showed her the trick with the back roller that isn't in any manual. "Where did you learn that?" she asked. "Nobody taught me," he said. "I broke it twice first."

"That's exactly the problem," she said, and she meant the machine, not him. The programmes were stacked in boxes by half past nine, six hundred of them, folded and counted twice, with the green card lying on top of the last box like a small flag.

On the Wednesday Yusuf came in early, on purpose. He put the paper back into the trays before Nadia arrived, and he wrote the words on the labels himself, in his own handwriting, because the printed ones had annoyed him from the very first day.

Nadia saw them and said nothing until the afternoon. Then she asked, "What do we call the tray for the jobs that come back wrong?" Yusuf thought about it for a while. "Tuesdays," he said. She laughed, wrote it on a label, and that tray has been called Tuesdays ever since.