Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Albrecht Square ·
The Stamp Pad That Fills Itself
The registry keeps a rota for re-inking its stamp pad, and the rota is kept down to the pad, in the pad's own print.
- filed: "before the prefecture"
- reference: "AS/SP/02"
1. This writ concerns the stamp pad held at the registry counter of Albrecht Square, a wide tin-lidded pad of the ordinary purple kind, in service since before the current survey. Nothing about the pad itself is unusual when examined dry. What is unusual is the schedule.
2. Re-inking a stamp pad is a maintenance task, and like most maintenance tasks in this registry it is governed by a rota pinned to the inside of the counter door. The rota names the weeks, the officer on duty, and the ink issued per turn. This rota has been kept continuously. It is the keeping that is in question.
3. The rota is kept down to the pad. By this the registrar means the following: on the Monday of a due week, whichever officer opens first is expected to lift the pad, count how dry it has run, and record the fact in ink on the rota form. Protocol requires the officer to write the entry before re-inking, so that the dry count stands as evidence of need.
4. Entries began appearing without officers. The form fills itself in the pad's own print: that is, in purple, and in the manual impression the pad produces when a stamp is pressed to paper with too little ink beneath it. The letters arrive uneven, ghosted at the edge, with the faint doubled outline of a second press. Officers familiar with the pad's habits say they would know the print anywhere, having seen it on nine years of dockets.
5. The entries are correct. Where an officer has later checked the recorded dry-count against the pad's actual condition at opening, the figures have matched. The pad is dry by the amount stated, on the day stated, having been full at the close of the prior week. The arithmetic holds backwards and forwards. It holds better than the officers' own entries, one of which was found amended in the same purple print, the amendment being more accurate than the officer's original.
6. Attempts to stop the rota from filling have produced a consistent pattern. When the form is removed, a replacement appears inside the pad's lid, under the tin, folded once, in the same print, listing the same weeks. When the replacement is destroyed, the rota pin inside the counter door is found holding a fresh form by the following Monday. No officer has witnessed the hour of these replacements. The registry is locked from ten at night; the night porter reports the counter door unbolted from within once, in March, which the porter has entered in his own log and does not discuss.
7. The relevant question is what the rota is for. The registrar's view, offered twice and withdrawn once, is that a pad which schedules its own wetting no longer requires the registry, and that the registry's continued participation is a courtesy the registry cannot account for. The withdrawal of the view is itself recorded, in ink, in the registrar's own hand, dated the day after it was offered.
8. At the time of filing, the rota is current to the last completed week. The current week's line is empty. No officer has yet written it. The pad, by the evidence of a test impression taken on Wednesday, has not yet need of ink.
9. The registry proposes to wait until Monday and see whose hand appears.
10. Who is being kept down to whom.