Field note
A run sheet at 21:40 is more honest than the same sheet at 08:10.
In Footscray we asked to photocopy Friday’s sheet before the night closer rewrote it “neat.” The neat version had every suburb in order. The stained version had arrows, a coffee ring over two returns, and a name written twice because the first spelling was guessed from a mumbled call.
What the stains said
The arrows showed jobs leaping over a suburb that looked close on the map and was slow on the road. The coffee ring sat on two returns that were never offered; they were under the mug. The doubled name was a site that had moved loading bays without telling the desk.
None of this appeared in the morning recap, which listed “busy Friday” as the cause.
How we use it on a sit
We now ask hosts not to recopy sheets until we have traced them. Rowan still marks up copies in pencil the way he did at the Brunswick yard. The point is not nostalgia. The point is that dispatch flow lives in the marks people make under pressure, not in the tidy column they produce for the owner.
If you keep only the tidy column, you will hire for a problem you do not have.