Attendant

The Attendant is the smallest recognized rank of the Librarians and the only one that carries an active daily charge. An Attendant is assigned to a single workstation, aperture, floor-segment, or named object and is responsible for its condition, its register, and the small daily notations that allow the Tower to state, at any hour, what is currently on its shelves. The rank is ancient, poorly compensated, and impossible to abolish: no Concordance has yet been drafted that removes the Attendant without leaving something unattended.

Attendants are distinguished from Keepers, who hold segments, and from Librarians proper, who hold authority. An Attendant holds a place. Colloquially the office says that a Keeper may close a floor, but only an Attendant can tell you what was on it.

Appointment and the Charge

Appointment is by notation. A candidate's name is entered on the station plaque, countersigned, and thereafter the plaque governs. Pell was entered against workstation SC-45 in the Third Spiral on a countersignature now lost; the plaque remains the sole proof of appointment, and Pell's tenure is cited in Apparent Concordance Contradiction as an instance in which the register outlasted the record of the register's making.

The charge itself is set out in the Arrin Protocol, Article 7, which requires an Attendant to report the state of the station at each change of watch and to record anything newly present, newly absent, or newly ambiguous. The Protocol does not define "newly ambiguous." The Seventh Cadre took up the question in its methodological commentary and concluded that ambiguity was to be treated as a condition of the observer, not the shelf, a position never formally adopted and never formally withdrawn.

The Painting of the Western Opening

The archetype of the office is Attendant Colm Vesset, first attendant of Floor 4,712, who found the western opening unlabelable and answered the difficulty by painting over it. Vesset's prohibition survives, and the floor is now attended principally to ensure that the paint is renewed, since it flakes.

"The opening is not for the present watch. Renew the ground and let the matter stand."

— Attendant Colm Vesset, cited in West Stairwell, recension of 1904

Vesset's solution is taught to new Attendants as a model of economy. It is also taught, by other instructors, as a caution. Both curricula are in current use.

Notation, Quiet and Otherwise

Most Attendant work is notation. The Office of Attendant Clerks reports with some pride that on 14 Thermidor, 1911, its watch recorded the weather as "indistinct" — a formulation now standard at interior stations with no exterior aspect, and one that has never been amended. Attendants at stations with a view are expected to be more specific, and are frequently not.

Notation is not always quiet. The Archive Incident Log Δ-88/734 concerning the Shelf Collapse of Δ-88 draws substantially on Attendant-Prime Kael, whose watch record of the collapse runs to nineteen pages and whose testimony before the panel was considered, by the panel, to be longer than the collapse.

Paradoxical Stations

Certain stations resist notation, and the Attendants assigned to them are recorded as provisional. Elara Chen attended workstation SC-44, administratively paired with Pell at SC-45, and is the source of the earliest reports on paradoxical folio sequences. Her preliminary findings later contradicted the determination of DR-712-Ω — a contradiction the office has never resolved, because resolving it would require deciding which of Chen's two reports was the report. Chen was also, for a period, a provisional Third Attendant in the Bureau of Apparent Duplication, and reported from Annex Theta on the effects of Ephemeral Cartography on station registers.

The office maintains that an Attendant may describe a paradox but may not resolve one, resolution being the business of the Dispute Resolution Protocol 12-C panel. Whether an Attendant who describes a paradox has, in the describing, resolved it, is the single most-cited unresolved question in Attendant jurisprudence and has been referred to panel eleven times.

Disputes and the Register of Watches

The great internal controversy concerns the Register of Watches. Concordance 23 holds that a watch begins at the Attendant's arrival and ends at departure, while Concordance 31, Annex 2, holds that a watch begins at the change of the clock and that an Attendant arriving late has been attending since the hour regardless. The two cannot both govern a late Attendant, and both do. The Office of Attendant Clerks maintains a separate ledger in which arrivals are recorded twice, once by clock and once by person, and reconciles the two only at year's end, and not always then.

A subordinate dispute concerns relief. Attendants are entitled to relief at the half-watch, but the Cadence Index has no entry for relief, since relief is not an interval but an absence, and the Index measures intervals. Attendants have accordingly been instructed to record relief as a gap in the register of no stated duration, which is how many of them describe the work itself.

Insignia and Maintenance

Attendants wear no insignia beyond the station key and a brass tally bearing the station number. The tally is returned at the end of tenure and is the only object an Attendant is forbidden to clean. Attendants assigned to the Whorl are additionally issued a folding stool, which must be carried, not stored, and which is checked at the half-watch along with the register.

Attendants are reminded that the charge survives the Attendant. The plaques are not repainted between tenures, and a new Attendant at an old station may find the names of six predecessors beneath their own, which the office considers instructive.