Short story · 3 min read · Set in Hanok-ro ·
The Shift Book of the Second Pot
A canteen's shift book holds a second hand distinguished only by writing the teapot first.
The canteen on Hanok Ro serves the yard four shifts a year — the clock changes, the audit week, the two seasonal works — and it is run by one book, which is kept in the drawer under the till. The book is ruled the way shift books are ruled, with the day down the side and the tasks across the top, and the first task on every line, before trays, before floors, before the doors themselves, is: second pot on.
This rule looks like an ordinary rule about tea. It is not, and everybody who has worked the canteen longer than a month knows it is not, and the book is the method by which nobody has to say so.
The understanding is this. One pot is put on by whoever is rostered. A second pot, on some nights, is put on by someone else. The book's task column does not write *who*, only *that*, and there is a column for initials, and the initials rule is strict: write your own initials only beside work you did. The work you did not do, you leave, and the book fills it in, or it doesn't; either way the tea is made.
The staff who keep the book longest have learned not to inquire after the second pot with anything heavier than weather. There was a girl took a slate to it once and kept a tally of who was rostered and who drew the cups. Her arithmetic came out every night one pour ahead of the roster, and she took the tally down to the office, and the office said what the office says, which is that the canteen on Hanok Ro holds two shifts a year, not three, and she had counted the clock-change night twice. She had not. She was moved to the bakehouse in the same week, at her own request as it is written, and she has worked there morning hours ever since, and will not stand near a urn.
The rule the book enforces is a rule about order, in both senses. The second pot must go on *after* the first and never alongside. Staff who put two pots straightway on, careless, out of the way they do it at their own homes, get their trays back wet through from the wash, night upon night, until they learn. It is not punishment. It is the same as teaching a man the doors on a ward: there is an order to a warm room, and the order is held to be somebody's business, and the book is where the business is written.
And the order has a further turn to it, known to the late shifts and known to the book. On the nights the second pot is not wanted — the nights the yard empties early, when the last bus is gone before the big oven is even cool — the book still wants its line filled. And the staff have learned to fill it, and to fill it *in order*, first pot and then second, and to leave the initials column blank, and to say nothing about it at the wash-up, and to leave one cup out, washed, on the cold plate, because the book says *second pot on* and the book is the only account of the room, and the account does not lie.
The last figure in the ledger that matters is this: no second pot has ever gone to waste. The tea is drunk, the leaves are emptied, the warm pot stands down the step by the sink to air, and the drawer takes the book, and the yard goes dark. Two shifts a year, the office says. The staff of the canteen on Hanok Ro know what they know, and keep the rule, and wash the one cup, and the question the newest of them asks, and the oldest of them cannot answer, is the simple one.
On the nights the yard empties early and there is nobody in the room but the staff and the wet floor — who, in the book's own terms, is the second shift?