Archived report · 4 min read · Set in St. Kilda Infirmary ·
The Report on the Waiting Count
The outpatient hall's tally counter records more attended than were presented, and every careful method set to work on the difference finds it to be nil.
- filed: "before the clinic year"
- reference: "SK/WC/06"
1. This form reports on the waiting-room count kept in the outpatient hall of St Kilda Infirmary through the season preceding the clinic year, and on the reconciliation of that count with attendance as recorded on the consulting side. The counting instrument is a brass tally counter of the ordinary pattern, four wheels and a thumb lever, on a chain at the desk, oiled quarterly. Standing instruction: one click for every person passed onward into a consulting partition; no click for enquiries, no click for the time. Operation by the waiting-room attendant, Mrs Enid Snell. The counter is reset to nil at the commencement of each clinic year, as customary, and the tally strip covering the season goes to file with this sheet.
2. Season total of the counter: 1,962 attended. Season total as struck from the consultants' session sheets: 1,786. Variance: 176, in the counter's favour. The variance was minuted at the October meeting and stood referred for reconciliation before the sheet could be signed, no year being permitted to open on a figure that two offices cannot share.
3. Method one: the card trough. Every person who attends leaves the desk the appointment card issued, into the trough provided, each card stamped at issue and dated by the partition officer on arrival. On the third of the month the trough was emptied and counted in one sitting, Mr Gilbert Ball, porter, attending in the capacity of witness: 1,962 cards. No card was found wanting its date, and no card was found stamped at other than the hall's own stamp. Set against the counter: difference nil.
4. Method two: the partition books. Each consulting partition keeps a day book and enters attendance in its own hand at close of session, patient by patient, the evening's last line ruled off under. The books were fetched and summed over two evenings' work by the registrar, Dr Bernard Tice: 1,962 entries of attendance. No entry was struck through, none was doubled where a margin could show it, and the ruled-offs sit square against the seasons on the spines. Set against the counter: difference nil.
5. The reconciliation therefore comes down to what the word attended is permitted to mean, and the form is glad to decide what it can decide. The session sheets struck their 1,786 off printed lists of persons expected in advance; they record expectation and were never built to record attendance. The counter, the trough and the partition books all record attendance after the fact, and the three agree exactly. Reconciled against attended by two independent methods, the difference is nil by both, and the variance of 176 stands discharged as an error of expectation rather than an excess of count.
6. For completeness only, and entered here as no finding: the porter's stick-log for the same season shows 1,786 persons through the double doors of the hall. The stick-log agrees with the session sheets and differs from the counter by the same 176. This form declines to reconcile a door against a chair. Doors count entries; chairs count sitters; the trough, the books and the oiled counter count attended; attended is attended; and the arithmetic that has kept this hall open forty winters is old enough to know its own people.
7. Mrs Snell has signed the sheet at the desk in the ordinary way and will take up the counter again for the new year. On the flyleaf of the tally strip there is a line in her hand: the room is quicker than the door and always was. The remark is not evidence and has not been treated as evidence. It is nevertheless her hand, she is the counter's keeper, and a keeper knows her instrument better than the instrument's doubt knows her.
8. Certified for filing under the reference overleaf, a diagonal note having come down from the Cantor's registry in the violet ink: counted, signed, let the year open. One query is left standing for the incoming season, because the sheet has room for it and the season will not: whether the counter counts the room, or the room is set by the counter; and where those two are one body, which of them the door admits, and which of them waits.