Notices of Irregularity

Definition and standing

Notices of Irregularity are the general class of written instruments by which an observed irregularity within the Tower is brought onto the record and thereafter becomes the property of the archive rather than of the observer. The class is defined residually: any instrument that does not fall under one of the specific designations — the Notice of Textual Irregularity, Notices of Spatial Anomaly, Notices of Incongruent Fact, Notices of Scheduled Dimming, or Form 447-A — is filed as a Notice of Irregularity by default. This residual character is the source of most disputes about the class, since the specific designations are themselves defined by exclusion in the relevant Concordances. A Notice of Irregularity is not a finding. It records that something was observed, by whom, on which floor, and at what hour of which day of the Omicron Calendar. It does not assert that the observation was correct, and it may not be cited as evidence that the observed condition obtained. It may, however, be cited as evidence that the observation was made.

Form and deposition

Notices are composed on the standard leaf of the receiving station and are deposited in the Irregularity Register, where the Receiver assigns one leaf per day. Registration is sequential; the absence of a registration number does not indicate that a Notice was rejected, only that the Register was full and the Notice was carried forward to the following leaf. Two known gaps in the Register, covering the third and ninth days of the Omicron year 3407, correspond to a period during which the Receiver's desk was flooded and no Notices were taken at all. Several hundred observations from that period were subsequently reconstructed from marginalia and are held in the Annex without registration numbers, a condition that the Office of Anomaly Designation has declined to regularize. The prescribed form of address is the floor number followed by the hour. Descriptive matter follows in a single unbroken paragraph. Emphasis by underlining is permitted twice per leaf; a third underline is treated as a second Notice and must be registered separately.

Relationship to the specific designations

The relationship between the general class and the specific instruments has never been settled to the satisfaction of both offices concerned. The Office of Concordant Interpretation holds that a Notice of Irregularity is converted, retroactively and by operation of the Concordance, into whichever specific designation later proves apt — so that a Notice deposited on Floor 611 concerning a cold corridor may, after the fact, be read as a Notice of Textual Irregularity if a text is subsequently found to be wrong there. The Curatorium of Verification rejects this reading on the grounds that a conversion cannot precede the observation it describes, and maintains that the general class and the specific designations are parallel streams that happen to share a Register. The disagreement matters in practice because the Notice of Textual Irregularity defines the scope of any Textual Alignment procedure and the scope of all quarantine actions, whereas a Notice of Irregularity, standing alone, defines nothing. Under the Office's reading, a single general Notice can, given a sufficiently accommodating later discovery, open a quarantine on a floor that no one intended to close. Under the Curatorium's, the same Notice remains inert indefinitely and must be refiled.

Notable cases

The most cited instance is the Notice deposited on Floor 611 concerning a corridor in which visitors were observed to be walking slowly. Standing Notice 3 of that floor, which instructs visitors to keep moving in the cold corridor, is generally understood to have originated in it, although the Register entry itself contains no recommendation and no clause. The Auditors of Precedent have twice attempted to treat the Notice as a Notice of Procedural Intent by implication; both attempts were withdrawn after the Adjudication Chambers observed that implication is not a mode of deposition. A second case, frequently invoked by the Office of Concordant Interpretation, is that of the clerk Hesper Vane, who filed fourteen Notices of Irregularity on a single leaf in the winter of 3391 concerning the behaviour of a stairwell near Floor 204. The stairwell was subsequently found to be sound. Vane's grievance, recorded in the Annex and never formally answered, was not that her Notices were dismissed but that they were never assigned a status at all — neither dismissed with prejudice nor without, but simply carried forward, leaf after leaf, until she left the post.

"A Notice of Irregularity that has been carried forward three times is not a weaker Notice. It is a stronger one that no one has read."

— Hesper Vane, marginal note, Irregularity Register, leaf for day 212

Practice

Notices are to be written in the Petitioner's Ink where a Black Out is contemplated; otherwise ordinary ink suffices. Visitors may not file Notices themselves, though they may be the subject of them, and are frequently unaware that they are. Notices concerning visitors are filed at the receiving station of the floor on which the visitor was last seen moving against the general direction of traffic. No Notice of Irregularity has ever been destroyed. Several have been lost, and one, concerning a door on Floor 88 that opened inward on days when it should have opened outward, has been found four separate times in four different Recensions of the Register, each time with a different registration number and each time in a different hand.