May 6. Public relations rang.
An enquiry had come in from outside. A magazine reporter had called to ask whether this company holds a lighthouse log from sixty years back and whether they could come and cover it. The person in PR had not known such material existed.
I said it does. And I asked how the reporter knew.
They said they saw it on the network.
In the afternoon I connected to the network. The computer room has one line for outside access. It is used when something has to be downloaded and otherwise sits idle.
Finding the post on the club board did not take long. The title was A Lighthouse Keeper's Log from 60 Years Ago (Scan). Posted April 27.
The body was short. Old material turned up while sorting records at work, it read well, so here it is. No company name. The file was attached.
Views were over four thousand two hundred. More than five times the newsletter's eight hundred, and few of them would be our people.
There were sixty-eight replies.
Who posted it was easy enough to guess. One of the nineteen departments that looked it up after the newsletter, and the post's tone was young. Confirming it would mean matching lookup records against a poster's ID, which is not my privilege, and I do not know what I would do with the confirmation.
I told general affairs first. Their man said material that ran in the newsletter is unlikely to be much of a problem, but that he would look up the regulation.
I read the replies from the top. Most were short. Enjoyed it, the old handwriting is beautiful, where did this come from. A few wrote at length about tides against what they knew.
Around the fifteenth, someone quoted a sentence. They said they liked this part and copied one line out as it was.
I did not know the sentence.
I opened the file and searched. Not there. I checked the comparison table. Not among the eleven lines present only in the files either.
I could not ask the person who wrote the reply. Sending a message on the network needs an ID of my own, and creating a personal ID on a company line breaches the rules. The reply did not say where the sentence came from. The tone was simply that they liked it and copied it.
I downloaded the file attached to the post. It was a different size from ours. Opened, the page count matched and the quality was a little lower. Compressed for uploading, it seemed.
I looked for the sentence. It was there.
I put the two files side by side and looked at the page in both. The top was identical. The same writing, the same stains. In our file that place moves to the next line; theirs has one line more.
The same material in copies, and they differ. Which came first can be known by time. Ours did. What went up on April 27 is a copy made from ours. The copy has one line more than the original.
Until last month I compared paper against file. Now I compare file against file.
I checked the regulation. The material is not confidential. It holds no personal information. A staff member downloaded something in the company-wide index and posted it outside, which is a procedural fault but hard to treat as a disciplinary matter, in general affairs' view. A deletion request could be made.
Make the request and the post is deleted. The attachment is deleted. How many of the four thousand two hundred views downloaded it is unknown, and what was downloaded cannot be deleted.
I looked at that sentence a long time. Where the line runs between what can be deleted and what cannot was perfectly clear. What is on a server gets deleted. What has gone into people's hands does not. And no department counts how many hands.
I decided to make the request. Better than not.
What to put in the reason field was again the problem. Asked why material that is neither confidential nor personal should come down, I have no answer. I wrote unauthorised external posting of company material. That is true, and of the true things it was the one that could be written.
Having filed it I spent the afternoon thinking about something else.
What did I do in this?
I scanned. I registered. I wrote archive record on a list. I agreed to a newsletter quotation. That is all. I sent nothing outside.
And now a lighthouse log from sixty years back is on a network board, four thousand people have seen it, and a magazine is asking to cover it.
The sheet with eight steps was in my drawer. Lay, press, save, registered, indexed, found, requested, copied. Two more have attached themselves to the end. Posted, spread. Ten steps, and my hand still touches the first three.
Without the first three the other seven would not exist. That is true.
But the first three were my work. Everything in the archive is subject to scanning in principle, the computer room said, and I followed. Not doing it is failing to follow an instruction.
Whether it grew because it was spread, or I spread what was going to grow, I cannot separate. Not being able to separate does not clear me either. I feel as though I read that sentence somewhere and cannot remember where.
PR decided to decline the magazine. Releasing internal material outside takes several levels of approval and no one does that for a piece that size. I was relieved by the decision and then found my own relief strange.
Declining does not remove what is on the board. It only keeps it out of a magazine. Until this morning I thought that a large difference and by the afternoon a small one. A magazine is tens of thousands of copies and the board is four thousand views. Except a magazine goes out once and ends, and the board keeps growing.
Before leaving I opened the drawer and took out the comparison table.
Beside the sheet with eleven lines I wrote down one more, the sentence I saw on the network today.
It came to twelve.
Written out, the twelfth attached itself after the place where the eleven ended. I had thought the sentence was finished. It was not. The sentence was still going.
I put the sheet back in the drawer and locked it. What locking is good for I already learned last month, and today I did not even have the thought.
On the subway home the person opposite me was reading a magazine. A magazine with nothing to do with our company. Even so my eyes followed the pages they turned. Following them, I knew what I was looking for.
There is no chance of finding it. Not yet.