Archived report · 3 min read · Set in The Marlowe Building ·
The In-Tray Kept Full After The Transfer
A transfer sheet lists one in-tray as vacant and furnished, and the tray is kept full to the edge of each date.
- filed: "after the transfer"
- reference: "MB/IT/17"
1. This writ is filed on the moved officer's own form, which the registry has permitted as an irregularity, the officer being departed and the desk being otherwise unclaimed. The form is in the first person throughout. The registry has decided it would be stranger to revoice it.
2. I transferred out of the Marlowe Building in the spring, to a post in the sorting annexe. The transfer sheet was done properly. It lists fixtures vacant and furnished, and among them, at item eleven, my desk's in-tray, described as vacant and furnished. Vacant meaning no officer attached. Furnished meaning the tray remains in place, in standing order, supplied.
3. Since the transfer I have been shown, and have twice gone back to see, the state of that tray. Someone is keeping it full. It is not an overflow; it is kept to the edge of each date. On the first of a month it holds a first-of-a-month's worth of paper. By the twentieth it holds twenty days' worth, stacked, sorted, waited on. The volume rises with the calendar and is drawn down, never cleared, at the month's turn.
4. The paper in it is mine in the sense that it is addressed to the desk: memoranda headed with my old room, circulars listing my old extension, drawings persisted to a name that is still mine on the internal roll. The roll has been asked to amend. The roll answers that the amendment is in hand. The roll has answered so for four quarters.
5. What I cannot account for is the ordering. The tray is kept top-sheet-first, newest on top, which is correct practice, and the sheets below are held back to their dates. A memo dated the ninth does not rise to the top of the stack before the ninth. I checked this over three consecutive days. The papers behave as if they know tomorrow's date and are content to wait for it.
6. The registry's own queries went unmarked for a fortnight and were then returned to us in the same tray, answered, in carbon, initialled by an officer who has not served since the survey. The initials are counted legitimate: the registry no longer distinguishes, at the level of initials, between officers serving and officers held.
7. I have asked twice to be put back on the supply list for the tray, so that I might at least see what I am sent. Both requests were returned to the tray itself and filed there, pending the date to which they were dated. A third request I did not send. It arrived in the tray all the same, in my own hand, dated the very week I had returned it from thought.
8. The registry has compared the third request against my hand of record and finds the match within nuisance tolerance. My hand has not been issued to anyone. The registry is careful to say that this is not evidence of anything, only a comparison table with a coefficient in the final column that the registry has declined to calculate.
9. The registry's recommendation is to leave the arrangement standing. The tray costs nothing, holds nothing improper, and the annexe has notice of it. My recommendation, offered as the person formerly at the desk, is the same, for a different reason, which the registry has asked me to state.
10. I collected my forwarding post from the tray on the last day of August and found at the bottom of the stack, dated ahead, already, a sheet headed with a date in the winter, telling me, as a circular tells a room, that the desk was required elsewhere.
11. Whose vacancy is being furnished, mine or the tray's.