# Seventh shift set as the day casual starters get the keys

> A new Slop University signage poster reports the spread of shadowed shifts before a casual starter is trusted to close, and describes the Seventh Shift now written into campus food and retail offer letters.

Asked when they stopped watching a new starter close, 1,138 supervisors gave
answers that ran from the third shift to well past the twentieth. A research
poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, published today for the
University's bus-stop and campus display panels, sets out the spread, and the
University has settled the matter at seven.

> Everyone we asked could name the day trust arrived, and no two of them named
> the same one. We found that a restful thing to learn.
>
> --- Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds

Dr Ntuli led the work with Lecturer Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Lecturer Dagny
Okafor. The team gathered recollections from supervisors at 412 cafés,
franchise outlets, bars, restaurants and shops, asked each of them twice, and
laid the answers out as distributions by kind of outlet. Franchise outlets
gather closely around one count. Bars and restaurants divide into two camps. The
pooled median sits between them.

Under the Seventh Shift, campus food and retail outlets will issue keys to each
casual starter at the close of their seventh shadowed shift, with the count
entered in the offer letter at hire. Supervisors who see a starter differently
may say so on an exceptions sheet kept for the purpose. Lecturer Nwachukwu said
the team had come to think of the seventh shift as "a place the roster can
finally be sure of."

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.18yn0m.