Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Brindley Logistics ·
The Freight of the Last Tag
The yearly freight reconciliation at Brindley Logistics closes on a final tag that is priced, weighed, and signed with no consignment behind it.
- filed: "after the sailing"
- reference: "BL/FT/44"
1. This report closes the freight year of Brindley Logistics, the year ending at the sailing. It is filed after the sailing, as the freight instructions require of a year's closing, and the closing is made on form BL/FT/44. The agreement of the form's reference with the matter at paragraph 4 is noted here once, so that it is on the record and left alone thereafter.
2. The freight year is kept by tags. A consignment accepted for shipment receives the next number in the BL/FT series, and the tag is its paper: number, consignment, weight by the bridge, price by the tariff in force on the day of acceptance, checker's signature. The tags run in order from the first of the year. The year closes at the last sailing, which again fell on the second of November, as it has a way of doing.
3. The ledger holds forty-three consignments for the year. Tags BL/FT/1 to BL/FT/43 agree with them line by line: weighed, priced, signed, and sailed. The forty-three balance the ledger to the ounce and the penny. No correction is due on any of them, and this office records it with satisfaction, the year's ordinary work having been ordinary.
4. The series nevertheless runs to forty-four. Tag BL/FT/44 exists, and it is with this file. It is in order in every particular a tag is examined by. It is priced, against the tariff in force at the year's end. It is weighed, by bridge ticket dated the fourth of the month, still on its roll, legible, and punched. It is signed, by the checker, dated the day of the sailing. What it has not got is a consignment behind it. The ledger closes at forty-three and offers the tag nothing to stand on.
5. The checks were made as follows. The tag's weight agrees with its bridge ticket, and the ticket with the bridge's day-book. The tag's price agrees with the tariff, by weight and by date. The tag's date agrees with the day of the sailing, the freight office's last day of opening before the year turned. The signature was set against the checker's standing signatures and agrees. Nothing on the tag is out of order. The tag's only defect is that there is no more to it than the tag.
6. The checker, S. Bream, was asked, and answered steadily. He signed what the bridge printed, on a consignment set down for the last sailing. He does not recall the set-down, nor who brought it, nor the look of it on the bed of the lorry, having signed tags these eleven years and kept none of them in his head. Every tag he has ever signed has had cargo on it. This one, he says, was no different, and if the ledger is a line short, then the ledger mislaid the line. This office notes that ledgers do not mislay lines.
7. The last sailing's manifest reconciles without the tag, crate by crate, against the quay tally. Taken with the tag, it exceeds the quay tally by the tag's weight and no more, and the year's total taken with the tag runs over by the tag's price and no more. The excess and the tag agree with each other exactly, which is another way of saying that everything about the tag is accounted for except the tag.
8. No consignor for the tag is found on the file, and the freight year cannot be held open past the sailing: the instructions close it there, and this office has followed the instructions. Tag BL/FT/44 is therefore retained behind the ledger as the year's last tag. It is priced. It is weighed. It is signed. It is owing to no one, and the practice of this office with a debt owing to no one is to keep the paper against the day the debt is claimed.
9. It is the recommendation of this office that the tag be carried into the new freight year and entered in its tally as held from the sailing, which keeps the series unbroken. It is further recorded, as this report closes, that the new year will end at its own last tag, and that if the tag is carried whole, the new year's last tag is already on the file. How many years in succession one tag can be the last tag of is not set out in the instructions, the instructions having assumed, as this office always has, that a last tag has a consignment behind it.