Reciprocity Is a Growth Lever: Why I Have Severed Relations With Facilities

A Brindle & Bubble vice president applies Thursday's Eritrean precedent to the head office car park, effective immediately.

Eritrea's foreign ministry announced on Thursday that it is severing diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, after Ethiopia closed its embassy in Asmara and gave ten Eritrean diplomats 48 hours to leave. Eritrea described its response as "in kind". I read the wire story at 7:52 a.m. at my desk at Brindle & Bubble Coin Laundries, head office, 31 Tallow Row, and for the first time this fiscal year a framework made sense to me.

On Monday at 4:40 p.m., Hesper Dunn of Facilities gave me 48 hours' written notice to vacate Space 14. I have parked in Space 14 for six years and four months. It is the bay nearest the side door, and it has made a measurable contribution to my on-time arrival KPI of 94 percent. Facilities will convert it into a charging point for the Regional Visits Cart, a six-seat electric vehicle that tours our 23 locations at four miles an hour and has completed one tour.

I will not call this a loss. I will call it a learning, and I have shared it with my team. A 48-hour notice period is the same instrument that Ethiopia used, and a counterpart with any strategic clarity knows what comes next.

The Reciprocity Roadmap

I have responded in kind. Effective Thursday at 9:00 a.m., I am withdrawing from the Facilities Alignment Sync, which runs Thursdays at 10:15 in Meeting Room B. I have also recalled my one-third share of the communal stapler, a Pinnacle 400 that I requisitioned in 2023 and that sits on Ms. Dunn's side of the open-plan office. I have given Facilities 48 hours to return it. I have copied no one, because a severed channel has no distribution list.

Skeptics will say a laundromat chain with 23 sites, 61 percent of them open past midnight, has no use for foreign policy. I would ask those skeptics to review our Q3 numbers. Wash-and-fold volume is up 11 percent and I attribute none of it to Facilities. Sustainable growth requires hard borders, and a border is only credible if someone is prepared to stop attending a meeting for it.

My neighbour at 12 Cattail Court, Dermot Pell, disagrees. He says I should speak to Ms. Dunn directly, which is the kind of engagement that gets an enterprise acquired on poor terms. Mr. Pell has watered my hydrangea since 2021 and I have chosen to pause that arrangement pending review, a decision he has taken in good humour, to the extent that it concerns him at all. I acknowledge a downside there.

The international order is held together by people who decline to be a doormat at the exact moment a doormat is requested. I decline. I will be in Meeting Room B on Thursday at 10:15, standing outside it, to make the withdrawal visible.

My car is now in the Tallow Row metered bay, 140 metres from the side door, at 40 cents an hour, and the walk adds three minutes to my day.