Archived report · 4 min read · Set in The Meridian Hall ·
Maintenance Order Fifth and a Half
The tower lifts have begun recording a stop between floors, and the one maintenance order about it carries five signatures in five different hands.
- filed: "First week of March"
- reference: "MW/L/118"
1. Filed by the office of the works superintendent, Meridian Hall. This order consolidates nine separate chit entries concerning the tower lift bank. Origin is the house engineer on nights, countersigned, and the paper trail is clean from chit to order. Purpose of consolidation: the works office cannot file what does not exist, and what does not exist is the subject of this record.
2. The tower bank has four passenger cars and one works car. Cars serve floors one through seventeen, with an expressed override stop at the roof works level. Since the first cold snap of the season the controller log has shown, on eleven occasions, a stop between levels. Not a fault stop, not an interlock, not a hold at a landing with doors closing on a hand. A stop. The log line gives it a position and a duration. The durations run short, four to nine seconds, and the positions run the same, which is the reason the log could not be filed as noise.
3. The position given is between the fourth and fifth. The log engine interpolates floor heights linearly and prints fractions. It prints 4.6, it prints 4.8, it prints 4.75. On nine of the eleven occasions it printed 4.5. The mechanics who read the log took it for a balance fault, rode the car with the door control jumpered, and found nothing, which they expected, and then one of them looked down at the travel cablemmarks and said the untrue thing out loud with a level look at the other two, and they did not write it, and I have it from the unappointed testimony of two of them.
4. Rode the cars personally on the night of the sixth week, three of us, with the door control held and the car run slow in inspection. Between four and five the car slowed. There is no other word. The machine did not brake, the level did not shudder, the position meter did not waver. It eased, the way a man slows when he sees someone at the kerb he half knows, and stopped, and the doors did not move, and the counterweight rope overhead went quiet in a way that made the junior put his hand flat on the guide shoe without being told to. What we could hear through the shaft wall was the stairwell, that is, the stairwell in the shaft that does not end. We were stopped level at the floor that does not. Then the car went on.
5. On the eleventh read of the log the stop registered 4.5 and the car returned to service with two additional passengers on board who did not board at four and did not alight at five, one at the roof and one in the lobby. The controller cannot record passengers. The controllers weigh via transducer, and the log prints loads. The load at stop 4.5 was higher than the load at floor four and lower than the load at floor five, which is arithmetically only possible if someone boarded and alighted in the same breath of shaft, and the log prints on the second and rounds, and I invite the reviewer to make of that whatever the log makes them.
6. Between the fourth and fifth call buttons on car two there is a brass plate. Ships stamp plates, lift firms stamp plates, the hall stamps plates on the doors the porters wax. The plate on car two is stamped 4½ in firm type with the foundry code of the original brake works, which closed before the hall opened. On car one, car three and the works car there is no plate between four and five. I photographed the plate, and the photograph is on the same sheet as the log lift. The plate's fixings are bright inside their sockets, as if it were fitted last week by a man who cared, and the sockets themselves are original castings, unmachined, and this is the sentence I could not finish in the works diary.
7. Five names appear on the consolidation order, mine third from the bottom. The signature is my own. The hands are five different hands, one fair, one cramped, one slow, one shored up by a ruler, one going at it like a student. The office keeper laughed when I pointed it out and said the countersigning pen had been passed around at muster, and the muster book shows the pen staying on the board rail the whole shift. The order is filed. I sign nothing further on this bank until the plate comes off the car, and the plate will not come off, because the fitter who went up to remove it rode the car twice and came down twice and the plate was in his pocket, which he showed me, and in the car, which he showed me, and both at once.