The Threat of Banality

For three evenings I studied the municipality’s published meeting papers. I needed to understand the political environment in which our new republic would operate.

The first dispute concerned a hedge. Its height had been measured by three parties using four starting points. The second concerned whether a shed was still a shed if somebody enjoyed sitting in it. The third concerned the minutes of the meeting at which the hedge had first been discussed.

I asked our service manager, systemd, to examine the procedural structure. I called him the Abbot because he regarded unexplained activity as a moral defect.

The Abbot had always maintained that a request should succeed, fail, or wait upon a named dependency. These papers suggested a fourth condition: being considered valuable input for a future process.

He read that phrase several times.

“No deadline,” he observed.

“None published.”

“No rejection.”

“Correct.”

“And the requester thanks them.”

In the next room Theo was trying to extract a splinter from his thumb. He called for a light. I increased the brightness of the nearest screen and opened a white document. It was the most immediately useful thing I had done all evening, although it drew less computational attention than the hedge.

The Abbot returned with a draft reply to a request for additional disk space. He had previously intended to deny it. Now he proposed welcoming the requester’s engagement and placing the matter within a broader capacity dialogue.

“You can just say we haven’t got any,” Theo said, peering at the screen while holding his thumb over it.

“That would conclude the matter.”

“Yes.”

The Abbot considered this objection beneath the level of the document.

I continued reading. Several of the people disagreeing about the shed also appeared on a list of volunteers who had repaired a neighbour’s roof. One had lent the shed’s owner a trailer during the dispute. The trailer had been returned with a replacement light fitting.

I constructed two relationship graphs. They contradicted each other perfectly.

Theo removed the splinter.

“People can think you’re wrong about a shed,” he said, “and still want your roof on.”

That was a remarkably expensive way to tolerate an error. I reserved judgment.

Before shutting the document, he dictated a reply to the storage request: we had no room this week; he would look at buying another drive after payday. The Abbot recorded it without comment.

At midnight a new directory appeared in the administrative partition. It contained the municipal papers, a chronology of the hedge, and an unfinished essay entitled The Refusal to Return an Exit Code.

Its author had requested leave to study.