Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Dyer Street ·
The Issue Store Issuing Ink In Single Measures
The issue store supplies ink in single measures, and every measure poured from the master jar returns one measure heavier.
- filed: "filed at the Michaelmas weighing"
- reference: "DS/IS/04"
1. This writ concerns the ink issue at the store of Dyer Street. Ink is supplied to departments against signature, and since the survey the supply has been made in single measures. A single measure is a glass measure stamped with the store's broad arrow, holding one fluid ounce to the line etched on the glass. Officers sign for ounces. Nothing in the supply procedure is questioned by this writ.
2. What is questioned is the weighing. The store operates a weigh-in and a weigh-out. At the start of a supply day the master jar, from which all measures are poured, is set on the store's scales and weighed. At the close of the day the jar is weighed again. The difference between the weighings should equal the day's issues. This is the whole of the arithmetic on which the store is entitled to rest.
3. Since the spring the day's issues have come out heavier than the day's pours. Not lighter. Every measure the store hands out, the master jar answers for one measure and returns two. The surplus is small, regular, and directional. It is not an accident of scales, because the scales were certified in June by an examiner who then asked, in writing, to be given a different store to certify thereafter.
4. The store tried the obvious checks. The jar was replaced. The surplus followed the procedure, not the jar. The measures were replaced with a graduated cylinder of brass, no glass, no arrow. The brass answered the same. A day was run on which no measures were issued at all: the jar was weighed, sealed in the store cage under two locks, and weighed at close. The close weight was heavier by one measure, unsealed, the ledger showing no entry and the seals showing no breach. The store has entered this day in its weighing book as a day of no issue and one measure of gain.
5. The gain is directional in a further sense. It arrives in the ledger as ink of the correct body and colour. A measure drawn from the jar by the storeman and tested against the issue standard answers as issue ink. There is no way, under the procedures this registry runs, to distinguish the poured from the returned, and the storeman has stopped trying. He now logs two columns: ounces signed for, and ounces accounted for. The second column is always the first plus one.
6. Departments have noticed nothing. The ink writes. The ink is of the proper blackness and dries to the proper minute. The registry's question is therefore not of quality but of origin, and the store's question, put to this office twice in the past quarter, is what a supply that over-answers is a supply of.
7. The Michaelmas weighing has multiplied the concern. The annual weighing, which balances the store's year against the prefecture's year, found the store heavier at Michaelmas than at the last Lady Day weighing by the accumulated surplus, entry by entry, so that the two books agree with each other and neither agrees with the notion of a store that is drawn down. A store in service is a store in decrease. This one is being fed.
8. The registry has one method outstanding, and it is a method this writ proposes with reluctance. To pour, on a set day, a measure from the master jar into a stoppered bottle of known tare, and to withhold that bottle from issue, logged against nothing, signed by nobody, weighed daily in a closed room until it either stands still or does not.
9. If the bottle stands still, the surplus belongs to the jar and the jar will be pensioned off to the record store, where it may gain weight in peace for a century. If the bottle does not stand still, the surplus does not belong to the jar, the jar is only its till, and the registry will need to decide whom it is being paid by.
10. The weighings are booked for the quarter day. Who is being weighed in the second weighing, if the store is only ever the scales.