The sorting office

A grand Ankh-Morporkian municipal sorting hall, built of soot-dark brick and crooked stone, with tall arched windows, brass machinery, gas lamps and drifting steam. Streams of papers arrive from different parts of the city: a medical alert, a travel booking, a charity’s application and a bundle of search results, distinguished by simple pictures rather than words. An immense mechanical sorter diverts almost all of them before they reach a person. One file lands on the desk of a solemn human clerk, who raises a magnificent gavel as if the whole decision were his. Far above, in a tiny distant booth, another clerk has already set the sorting wheel.

An alert fires and a prescriber dismisses it. A passenger’s booking is run past a rule before the flight lands. A charity applies for a bank account. A query runs across a few million documents and returns a few thousand.

Somebody is left holding the judgement in each of those, and answering for it afterwards. None of them chose what arrived in front of them. A sensitivity was set, a criterion written, a category drawn or a search term typed, usually some time earlier and by somebody in a different building.

A system that never makes a final decision can determine the outcome by deciding what reaches a person. Nothing in the arrangement records that as a decision, which is what makes it hard to appeal, hard to audit, and easy to describe afterwards as a technicality.

Disclaimer

This file was assembled by choosing what to put in it, and the choosing appears nowhere in the pages that follow. The clerks have considered the matter and elected to press on.