Filed Replies, Vol. 4
From P. Okafor, Lagos:
I submitted a photograph of my uncle's 1997 Mitsubishi Fuso truck three weeks ago and have received no acknowledgment. The truck is enormous. Please advise.
I submitted a photograph of my uncle's 1997 Mitsubishi Fuso truck three weeks ago and have received no acknowledgment. The truck is enormous. Please advise.
The photograph may be enormous. The truck may be enormous. Neither constitutes enrollment in the catalogue until a completed Form 7 accompanies the submission, along with a dimensioned drawing or a certified measurement from a licensed assessor, per Style Guide Section III.2. We acknowledge nothing before the paperwork is complete. This is not a policy I enjoy explaining; it is a policy I wrote in 1994, and I stand by it. Submit the Form 7. If you do not have a Form 7, the submissions desk has them, or had them before Teddy reorganized the supply cabinet in April.
From G. Tremblay, Quebec City:
My neighbors' compost heap has expanded every spring for six consecutive years. It now occupies roughly 40% of the shared fence line. Does it qualify as a thiccc subject under the cultivated/selectively bred exemption?
The Atlantic Giant Decision (March 2009, Precedent 2009-03, available at /about/documents/atlantic-giant-2009/) extended eligibility to cultivated subjects under Section II.4, but the operative word in that decision is "cultivated," meaning deliberately shaped toward a girth outcome. A compost heap grows; it is not cultivated in any sense the catalogue would recognize. Your neighbor is not a horticulturalist; he is a person with a permissive attitude toward organic matter. Filed objection to the records desk that the Atlantic Giant Decision continues to be misapplied by the reading public, who appear to believe it covers anything that gets bigger over time.
From D. Fenchurch, Bristol:
The coffee in the office kitchen at my workplace has been undrinkable since a machine breakdown eight months ago. Management keeps promising to address it. Does this situation have a precedent in your experience?
Eight months. Constance Pribyl, our Director of Editorial Operations, promised a Q3 2018 review of the office coffee machine after I filed Grievance No. 14. We are now in Q2 2026. The machine has been non-operational since March of an earlier year than you would believe. Her most recent reply to my follow-up, dated May 9th, opened "Hi Bart!" and contained the phrase "still on my radar," which is, to my knowledge, the seventh consecutive reply to contain that phrase verbatim. My recommendation is to document everything, assign it a grievance number, and buy a kettle. The kettle I keep in my office, behind the credenza, has not failed me once.
From R. Molina, Mexico City:
The major trading nations seem to be placing tariffs on everything imaginable. As a cataloguing professional, do you have a perspective?
A tariff is a girth criterion, simply. It is a measurement threshold applied at the border of a category, determining what enters and what does not, and the nations applying them are doing what any responsible catalogue does: deciding, in advance, what belongs inside. My objection is not to the instrument but to the process. These thresholds are being set without a style guide, without a methodology memo, without any documented precedent structure, and in several cases without anyone in the room who has read the founding charter, let alone drafted one. The 1974 Founding Charter of this publication (available at /about/documents/founding-charter/) runs to eleven pages. Eleven pages is not a burden. It is a baseline. I have filed a general note to that effect with the records desk, for whatever it is worth, which is nothing.
From H. Quist, Accra:
I work in a small office. My senior colleague insists on claiming credit for the department's output in all external communications, using "we" where only his own labor was involved. Is this a known phenomenon?
Known, documented, and assigned a name in this office, though not one I will put in print. Constance Pribyl has written "we implemented a revised filing protocol" in four consecutive quarterly reports, referring to a protocol I drafted alone between the hours of 7 a.m. and noon on a Tuesday in November 2021, using a yellow legal pad and the Swingline 747 stapler that lives in my desk drawer, not the communal one. The phenomenon is not new. Grievance No. 38 in the Personnel File covers it at some length. The short answer to your question is: yes, keep your own records, date them, and do not lend anyone your stapler.