Filed Replies, Vol. 2
From P. Okafor, Lagos:
I submitted a photograph of my uncle's chest of drawers last November and received no reply. The piece is enormous. Surely this qualifies?
A chest of drawers is furniture, which places it in a category I have spent seventeen years defending against exactly this kind of lateral thinking. Volume alone is not girth criterion; the Style Guide, Section II, has said so since 1986. I will note, for the record, that your uncle's chest is also not your uncle's chest, which is the sort of thing that becomes a problem in filing. Objection to the ambiguity of submission logged with the records desk. Please resubmit with a clearer subject and a silhouette diagram per Amendment 1991-08.
From C. Holloway, Tucson:
Is there a reason the coffee machine in your office has been broken since March? I visited on a press pass and it seemed like a simple fix.
March. I appreciate the precision, but to be accurate: since March 2018. What began as a routine maintenance grievance, Grievance No. 14, has been parked, re-parked, tabled, and once described by Constance Pribyl as "on my radar" in a reply that opened, as they all do, "Hi Bart!" The machine is a Bunn VP17-1, commercial grade, and it is sitting on the credenza in my office because Facilities has had the cart since February. I filed Grievance No. 47 on the matter of the cart on April 9th. No reply. I drink water.
From F. Delamare, Montreal:
I notice your field correspondent Spider Hennessy filed a dispatch from Nairobi last month, but his expense report was postmarked Port-au-Prince. I find this unusual.
I find it consistent. Spider's expense reports have been postmarked from a different city than the dispatch for as long as Spider has been employed here, which is long enough that I have stopped finding it unusual and started finding it load-bearing, in the sense that if it ever stopped, I would assume something had gone wrong. I flagged the geographic discrepancy to Constance under Grievance No. 38. She said, and I am quoting from her written reply, "Spider's workflow is Spider's workflow." Filed that response to the personnel file, where it now sits between Grievance No. 31 and Grievance No. 41, and where it will presumably remain until the sun expands to consume the inner planets.
From A. Szymanski, Gdansk:
Given recent shifts in global trade policy, do you think the catalogue should take a position on tariffs?
A tariff is a girth criterion, simply. It determines what passes through a border and what does not, based on a classification system, applied inconsistently, by people who have not read the methodology memo. We published a methodology memo in November 1999 specifically to address what happens when external bodies attempt to impose their own classification frameworks on a subject domain they do not control; I would direct you to /about/documents/methodology-memo-1999/ and then, if you have further questions, to the Standing Order on External Bodies, last revised 2024. The catalogue does not take positions. The catalogue documents. The distinction is one I have been making since before Gdansk had a container port worth arguing about, and I will continue making it until someone turns off the lights.
From O. Brennan, Cork:
My neighbor has grown a pumpkin he claims is catalogue-eligible. He says the Atlantic Giant Decision covers him. I am skeptical. He is very smug about it.
Your skepticism is reasonable but, I regret to say, not vindicated by precedent. The Atlantic Giant Decision of March 2009, Precedent 2009-03, confirmed that cultivated and selectively bred subjects are eligible under Section II.4, provided the silhouette test is passed and the cultivation method is documented at submission. The smugness is not a factor I can weigh under current methodology, though I will say that if the 2014 Submissions Freeze Proposal had been adopted, as I recommended in writing, your neighbor would have nothing to be smug about, because the catalogue would have closed to new pumpkin entries twelve years ago. It was not adopted. I have filed my position on that outcome, repeatedly, and it is available for review in the personnel file, cross-referenced under Grievance Nos. 22 and 41.