Roz Nightlairde's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Roz came in at dawn with her draft pages under one arm and found the hallway already papered against her. A cork board hung by the main door, wider than her shoulders, covered in checklists and pickup slips. Someone had circled version numbers in red. Someone had ticked off department names as pages went out. She stepped close and read the header. A department head had printed his own handbook revision overnight and started routing it, floor by floor, before the sun cleared the roof. Roz counted the checkmarks. Four departments already held his pages. Two more were listed for pickup by noon. She did not pull his board down. She walked past it to the mail room and set her draft on the counter. She had one morning to beat him to every desk that mattered. She pulled a stack of interoffice notice sheets from the rack, the kind with the red official mail banner and a signed receipt line at the bottom. Each sheet cleared the internal courier ahead of ordinary post. She clipped a notice to every chapter of her draft, wrote the department code, stamped the time, and signed the receipt line herself. Then she carried the bundle to the courier window and watched the clerk log each one into the morning run. Once a notice was logged, no other document could overtake it in the same delivery. By nine she had cleared the mail room and moved to the corridor outside her office. She bolted a framed release plaque to the wall beside her door. The plaque named her as the approving officer, listed the version number of the draft now in circulation, and carried the company seal at the top. Under the plaque she set a low table with fresh copies of each chapter, stacked and labeled, free to any department head who signed the log. When the first curious clerk stopped, Roz handed him a chapter, took his signature, and marked the log. He asked which version was the real one. She tapped the plaque. He carried her pages back to his floor. By eleven the courier had delivered her notices to every department on the list. The department head arrived at her door at quarter past, holding one of his own revisions and one of hers. He said his pages had gone out first. Roz opened the courier log and showed him the time stamps. His pages had moved by hand. Hers had moved by official mail, logged and receipted, and had reached four of the six departments before his runners did. She told him any revision not matching the version on her plaque would be pulled from circulation by end of day. He left without the copy he came in with. Roz sat down and began chapter twelve.