Filed Replies, Vol. 20
From P. Okonkwo, Lagos:
I submitted a photograph of a hippopotamus last Tuesday and received no response. The animal is extremely thiccc. What is the standard processing time?
Standard processing time is six to eight weeks, as stated on the submissions page, which has not changed since 2007. The hippopotamus, I will grant you, is a credible subject; however, a photograph is documentation of a subject, not a subject, and "extremely thiccc" is a personal assessment, not a measurement. If the submission included a lateral silhouette against a neutral background, per Amendment 1991-08 at /about/documents/amendment-1991-08/, it is in queue. If it did not, it is in a second queue, the nature of which I am not at liberty to describe.
From D. Fenwick, Aberdeen:
My neighbor's hedge has grown so large it now blocks my entire view of the street. I feel this qualifies it for the catalogue. Do hedges count?
A hedge is a perimeter device and not, under any reading of Section II of the Style Guide at /about/style-guide/, a discrete subject. The catalogue requires that a subject have a silhouette, which means it must be separable, in principle, from its surroundings. Your neighbor's hedge has merged with its surroundings; this is a zoning matter, possibly a civil one, and I wish you well with it. Filed objection to the records desk regarding the sixth submission of this type received in calendar year 2026, which is five more than I would like.
From H. Moreau, Montreal:
The coffee in the break room tastes like it was brewed in 1987. Is there a plan to replace the machine?
The machine in question is a Bunn VP17-2, installed March 2022, which failed in March 2023, and has been producing what I can only describe as warm brown abstraction since. I raised the matter formally in Q2 2023; Constance Pribyl, Director of Editorial Operations, parking-lotted it for Q3 review. That review has not occurred. It is now Q4 2026. Grievance No. 47 in the Personnel File at /about/documents/personnel-file/ covers this in full, along with my notation that the credenza outside the filing room was replaced in the same fiscal quarter with no grievance process whatsoever, which I find instructive.
From T. Ashby, Bristol:
I see that the UK has just imposed new import restrictions on American goods in response to the U.S. tariff escalation. What do you make of it?
A tariff is a girth criterion applied to commerce: it asks whether a thing is large enough, by value, to warrant a surcharge at the border. The British countermeasure is a counter-criterion, which any competent cataloguer would recognize as a filing dispute. The correct resolution is cross-referencing, not escalation; you do not solve a contested entry by opening a second contested entry. Both governments are behaving like junior cataloguers who have lost the original submission and are now generating paperwork to avoid admitting it. Teddy Whitmore-Adjacent has been in this situation continuously since 2011 and I have no evidence it resolves on its own.
From R. Vásquez, Mexico City:
I have read that your Foreign Correspondent, Spider Hennessy, filed a dispatch from Nairobi last month. His byline, however, lists him as writing from Lisbon. Is this an error?
It is not an error in any sense the catalogue is prepared to act on. Spider Hennessy's expense reports have been postmarked from a city other than his dispatch city for, to my knowledge, eleven consecutive years; the gap has been as wide as three time zones and, in one 2019 quarter, an entire hemisphere. No one on staff has met Spider Hennessy in person. The dispatches arrive, they are accurate, the expense reports are within budget, and the arrangement functions. I reviewed the Standing Order on External Bodies, last revised 2024, at /about/documents/external-bodies/, and found no clause requiring correspondent and byline city to be co-located. Filed note to myself to leave this alone.