Clerk of Unresolved Grievances

The Clerk of Unresolved Grievances is a standing office of the Registry of Pending Objections, established by instrument in the winter of the year the Fourth Concordance was recensioned, and held continuously since by a succession of clerks whose names are recorded but not published. The office exists to hold grievances that no other desk will accept, and to hold them without resolving them, since resolution would render the office unnecessary and its discontinuation has been twice proposed. It is distinct from the Archives of Satisfied Grievances, which receives only matters that have been concluded, and from the Repository of Unspoken Grievances on Sub-floor 88.b, whose holdings have never been spoken and therefore cannot be unresolved in the sense the office understands the term.

The distinction is finer than it sounds and has been litigated. A grievance that has been spoken but not answered is unresolved. A grievance that has been answered and not accepted is also unresolved, but belongs to the Department of Audible Grievances under Form A-7. A grievance that has been neither spoken nor answered belongs to the Repository and is not the Clerk's concern, a boundary reaffirmed in the Eleventh Memorandum of Collocation (clause 6) after an incident on Floor 231 in which a silent grievance was entered twice into the register and had to be struck from one side by a clerk who was himself forbidden from speaking of it.

Establishment and the Scept Petition

The office was created in response to a procedural gap noticed by Ovarin Scept, the ratchet-clerk of the Chronometrics Guild who had earlier filed the first Interval Grievances. Scept observed that the Guild's grievance desks returned unanswered petitions to the petitioner with a stamp reading Noted, Not Held, and that a petition returned is not the same petition as one filed. The Clerk of Unresolved Grievances was instituted to receive such returns and hold them in their returned state, thereby preserving the difference.

The founding instrument is brief and is quoted in full in the register's preface:

"The Clerk shall receive what is returned, shall not improve it, shall not summarise it, and shall return it only to the petitioner, and only once."

— Instrument of Standing Offices, Third Recension, clause 2

The closing provision has caused more dispute than any other sentence in the Instrument. Clerks have read only once as a limit on returns, on petitioners, or on the Clerk's own attention. The prevailing reading, recorded in the Marginalia of Clerk Amarine Voss, holds that it limits the Clerk.

The office and its secondary grades

The Clerk of Unresolved Grievances is ordinarily a clerk of the second grade and may not simultaneously hold a grade of the Unresolved unless the duties are exercised in different rooms. This follows directly from the precedent set by Clerk Amarine Voss, who established that a Scribe of the Unresolved may retain a secondary grade so long as the rooms of exercise remain distinct; the Registry has applied the same rule to its own office by analogy, which the Bureau of Analogical Precedent permits where the analogy is declared in the register's first folio and not afterwards.

In practice the Clerk works from a single room on the Registry's east landing, and the secondary-grade question has not arisen since a clerk attempted in the year of the second recension to hold both the Clerk's seal and the Seal of the Unsummed in the same chamber. The attempt was disallowed, not for the conflict of grades but because two seals in one room obscured the ink pad. The ruling is preserved as the East Landing Determination and remains the standard authority on ink.

Custody and the unresolved register

The office maintains the Unresolved Register, a bound volume in which each grievance is entered by date of return rather than date of filing, on the reasoning that the return is the event the office is constituted to record. The Register has never been paginated beyond its four hundredth leaf; a fifth volume exists but is kept unopened on the understanding that opening it would require the Clerk to decide what belongs in it, which is a resolution of sorts.

Custody disputes are frequent. The Register has twice been claimed by the Chamber of Docketed Grievances, which shares a wall with the Registry of Resonant Inertia and asserts a general right over any volume shelved against it. The claim was refused in the first instance by reference to the Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, and in the second by the simple expedient of moving the Register two feet to the left. A note in the Clerk's hand records that the second refusal was cheaper.

The following are held by the office as of the most recent inventory, and are not available for consultation except by the petitioners themselves:

• Four hundred and six returned petitions of the Chronometrics Guild, chiefly interval matters.
• The original objection of Clerk Anselm Vey, held on deposit and duplicated, by agreement, in the Annex of Unresolved Objections.
• One grievance concerning the Office of Unresolved Metrics filed by Clerk Overseen and noted in the margin against Melody Alpha Delta.
• The Silent Bell's written complaint, lodged before the bell passed into the custody of the Department of Audible Grievances and never withdrawn.

Conflict with the Department of Audible Grievances

The office's most persistent antagonist is the Department of Audible Grievances, which contends that a grievance rendered audible under Form A-7-T ceases to be unresolved and passes automatically to its own custody. The Clerk's position, maintained without variation since the Third Concordance was last amended, is that audibility is a property of the grievance's expression and not of its disposition, and that a grievance may be loudly unresolved for as long as the petitioner requires. The Department has not accepted this, but has ceased to press it, having found the Register useful as a holding pen for matters it prefers not to finalise before the issuance of a Final Resonance Certificate.

The arrangement is informal and neither office will commit it to writing. A clerk of the Department is said to have described it as "the only part of the arbitration that works," a remark recorded in the Second Book of Informal Remarks and there attributed to no one.

Notable holders and open questions

Twelve clerks have held the office. The longest tenure was that of Clerk Marlen Threnos, who served nineteen years and returned exactly one grievance, to a petitioner who had died in the interim, the return being made to the petitioner's address as the Instrument requires and received by the petitioner's landlord, who kept it. The shortest tenure ended after four days when the clerk read the Register's preface and resigned, citing the phrase shall not improve it as incompatible with his temperament. His letter of resignation is itself filed as an unresolved grievance, and the office has never ruled on whether a clerk may file against himself.

Whether the Clerk of Unresolved Grievances outranks a Clerk of Eternal Recitation is disputed. The Ninth Concordance places the Clerk above the Recitation office in the order of procession; the Tenth, in an annex that expressly supersedes the Ninth, places the Recitation office first and the Clerk "elsewhere." Both are cited in the Register's preface, in that order, without comment. Clerks have declined to settle the question, on the ground that settling it would be a resolution, and the office does not do that.