Archived report · 4 min read · Set in The Marlowe Building ·
Inventory of the Keyboardless Desk
Two departments that share no floor claim the same numbered desk in their asset audit, and the chair is warm on the rosters that cover nobody.
- filed: "Asset inventory, annual"
- reference: "MB/AS/40"
- status: folklore
1. Prepared for the annual asset inventory of the Marlowe Building and filed by me, Clore Weslin, senior clerk of Records & Registration, in respect of item MB/AS/40 and the counting problem attached to it. I have kept this note short and to the ledger, because anything longer invites margin comments, and the margin comments last year ran to four drafts and a withdrawn complaint. Item MB/AS/40 is a desk. It appears twice in this building's audit, and both appearances are ours, and neither will go.
2. First the building's arrangement, so the reviewer can see where the trouble sits. Records & Registration hold the fourth floor entire: nine rooms, a registry corridor, the card store. Plan Control holds the ninth floor entire, under the roof tanks, nine rooms to match, entered from the other stair. The two departments share no floor. There is no room with both departments' post in it, no shared cupboard, no transfer between us except the trays on the third-floor landing, and the trays are emptied by porters who carry nothing up. A desk on the fourth floor cannot without borrowing sit also on the ninth, and yet this year both inventories say it does.
3. Our count: room 4-C, against the window, MB/AS/40, one desking unit, tan laminate, three drawers, an empty keyhole in the top drawer, a burn scar near the left rear corner shaped like a comma. No keyboard on it. A typist's chair pushed under the knee hole, brown, one castor short. Counted and entered as every year since the sheet system began; the back sheets show the same entry in the same hand, item present, condition fair.
4. The cross-check rule requires our inventory and Plan Control's to be compared annually for duplicate asset numbers, the idea being that equipment wanders and the sheets should catch it. This year the comparison clerk, Imrit Falow, came down to me gray at the mouth. MB/AS/40 is on the Plan Control sheet as well. Ninth floor, room 9-C, against the window, one desking unit, tan laminate, three drawers, keyhole empty, burn scar near the left rear corner shaped like a comma. A typist's chair pushed under the knee hole. Not "similar." The same, and keyed the same, and numbered the same.
5. I went up to see. Room 9-C is room 4-C the other way about, which we all know, the two floors having been poured from the same drawing. The desk is there and the desk is here. I ran my thumb over the comma scar on both. I measured both, width, depth, height to the top of the unit, distance of the scar from the corner, and both sets of figures agree to the half inch, which is as far as I will honestly claim. I did not measure the chairs. I wish now that I had, and I will say why.
6. On the ninth floor, at eight past seven in the morning, before the heating hours open, before anyone rostered to that floor was due through the door, the chair at MB/AS/40 pushed in against the desk was warm. Not stirred warm, not sun through glass, the room's window being fogged and the sun below the roof line. Warm the way a seat is warm after somebody has just risen from it. I put my hand on it twice to be sure and wrote the time in my notebook beside the measurements.
7. I then did the check I was trained to do: the duty rosters. The night roster for the ninth floor lists two men, both signed out at the gate log before six. The fourth floor lists one firewatch, who records his rounds and does not sit at desks on any round, and whose round sheet puts him on the second landing at the relevant hour. Nobody was in 9-C. Nobody on paper had been in 9-C since the cleaners on Wednesday, and the cleaners do not warm chairs. The rosters cover nobody who could have sat, and I have attached them with the gate log unaltered so the reviewer does not take my word for the shape of that.
8. The Registrar directed that one occurrence of MB/AS/40 be struck and asked each of us which to strike. Records & Registration held a special count and struck the ninth-floor occurrence. Plan Control held their count the same afternoon and struck the fourth-floor occurrence. Both strikes are signed by department heads and both signatures are correct, and the item stands struck from two sheets and remains entered on both, which is not a sentence I know how to make smaller.
9. I recommend the item be carried forward as one desk, location un-agreed, pending physical survey by someone outside this building. I will note one thing only for whoever that surveyor is, and then stop. When I had finished the measurements in 9-C and was putting my coat on, I checked my watch off the wall clock out of habit, and the clock in 9-C shows the time as eleven minutes earlier than the clock in 4-C always shows it, and this was recorded last year too, by the comparison clerk, in the margin of the survey sheet, and nobody has subtracted the eleven minutes yet.