January 8. The box had been under the desk for four days.
In those four days eleven requests came in and all eleven were handled. Audit's twenty-two boxes were arriving in parts, two or three a day. Open what arrives, check it for faults, register it, pass it to audit, done. In four days I had a rough idea of what this work is. Records management without touching paper.
The box kept touching my knee. I tried to move it and it was heavy, so I left it. By the fourth day the fact of it being there felt like a job in itself.
In the morning I rang personnel. There is something here that looks like the predecessor's property, I said; what is the procedure for returning it? The clerk checked and said the rule is to contact the person and have them collect it. Could I have a number? Personal information, she said, so no, but personnel would call.
The answer came in the afternoon. The registered number is out of service. There is no other contact. So what do I do, I asked, and after some hesitation she said that if it looks like company material, handle it as the archive's; if it is personal property, it goes into storage for a period and then a disposal procedure.
To judge whether it was company material or personal property, I had to open it.
The lid came off easily. There was no nail or catch; it was simply resting there.
Inside were five bundles of paper.
The lower four were old. The paper was yellow and the edges were going. There was no title on the covers, only one line stamped on each. The same sentence on all four. I read it twice and it did not quite come through. Old phrasing.
The line was: We are watching a while longer. It was not printed but stamped, the same stamp on all four bundles. It could have been some institution's motto or a publisher's name. Old material often carries phrases like that, I have heard.
I turned the first bundle over carefully. A handwritten log. Something to do with a lighthouse. The hours the water came in and went out were set down day by day, with a person's story here and there between them. The second bundle was about a shaft. Numbers for measuring depth, a great many. The third had to do with telegraphy and the fourth with stacks. All four very old.
Only the one on top was recent. An ordinary college notebook with no name on the cover. Opened, it carried dates from June last year. The hand was one person's.
It was the predecessor's log.
I hesitated over whether I should read it. It is someone else's log. But judging company material from personal property was the instruction I had been given, and to judge it I had to see what was written. I turned the first few pages.
A work log. The transfer items handled each day, the number of boxes, the withdrawal entry numbers. Much like what I am keeping now. Only, sentences that looked to have nothing to do with the work were mixed in. Something about a screen, something about a cell. I read those as the person's private notes. Working alone underground for a long time seems to produce that sort of thing.
One passage caught. On a day in November a person's name was written down with a seat code beside it. On the next line, what became of that person that day. I did not know the name. Only that it was the same form of code I had seen in the personnel record, and whether such a code belongs in a private log I could not say.
The further on it went, the less work there was and the more of the other. November and December were almost nothing but the other. I skipped some pages and opened the last one.
December 16. The separation date.
There was one paragraph, and the sentence broke off in the middle. No full stop and no next line. Where the pen had come off the paper the ink had pooled a little.
from the one who reads to the one who copies, from the one who copies to
That was all. Below it two more sheets were left, and both were blank.
I read that line several times. What came next arrived on its own. From the one who copies to what. The sentence is built so that another step has to follow. Not knowing what it is while knowing that it has to be there was a strange feeling.
I closed the notebook and looked at the four bundles again. I opened the last page of each. All four broke off mid-sentence.
I sat in front of them for a while. That four old logs and one recent one all break at the same place did not feel like coincidence. But it is also true that old logs surviving whole is the rarer thing. Paper goes, people stop suddenly, and last pages are usually a mess.
Going to put the lid back on, I looked at its underside. Five stamp marks. The same stamp pressed five times. The place beside them was empty.
There was a field ruled on the side of the box too. A recipient's field, printed. Filled in by hand.
The next records-keeper.
Not a name but a seat. I looked at the field a long time. The person answering to that seat in this room now was me.
I rang the computer room and asked. Some old material with no registration number has turned up; is it subject to scanning too? The man thought for a moment and said that in principle everything in the archive is. Registration numbers get assigned during scanning.
Then these five bundles become files as well.
I said I understood and hung up. I put the box up on the desk. To get it into next week's scanning schedule I would have to make a list first.
To make a list I have to write one line for each of the five. Lighthouse log, survey log, telegraph log, stacks log. And for the last one I stalled a moment over what to write. Write predecessor's work log and it becomes personal property; write archive record and it becomes company material. What the same notebook is came down to one line I was writing.
I wrote archive record. It has to be written that way to be subject to scanning, and it has to be subject to scanning not to go to disposal. Better photographed than burned, I thought. That is what I thought at the time.