Office of the Ombudsman

The Office of the Ombudsman is a standing petitionary body of the Tower, constituted to receive, register, and answer complaints arising between offices, between offices and floors, and — in a narrow and much-litigated class of cases — between a floor and the number assigned to it. It occupies the western spur of Floor 412 (the Floor of Lamentations, Catalogued), and has done so since the amalgamation of the two rival ombudsmanries under Eleventh Concordance, Annex 9. The Office does not adjudicate. It receives; it registers; it forwards. The distinction is the whole of its character and most of its difficulty.

Constitution and remit

Under Eleventh Concordance, Annex 9, clause 3, "the Ombudsman shall hold no power of decision, and shall be answerable for the completeness of the register and for nothing further." This has been read, almost without interruption, to mean that the Office may not be faulted for the outcome of any matter it has forwarded, only for the manner in which it was forwarded. The doctrine is known informally among the staff as clean hands, empty hands, and is taught to new clerks in a single sentence, usually on the first morning.

The Office answers administratively to the Office of Catalogic Logistics, which supplies its paper, its seals, and its stair-lighting. Its complaint forms are certified by the Office of Verification, whose sub-department, the Office of Orthodoxy, periodically audits the register to confirm that every petition bears a legible floor number. The Office of Acoustic Stability has issued standing guidance on the volume at which petitioners may state their grievances; the figure is forty-one decibels, and the guidance is printed at the foot of every form, where few read it.

The register

The register comprises two hundred and six bound volumes to date, of which the first ninety are closed and the remaining one hundred and sixteen are open, bound in grey, and stored on the spur's upper gallery. Petitions are entered in ink, with the petitioner's floor, the respondent's floor, and a one-line summary. Volume 148 contains the celebrated entry of 7 Petrichor, filed by a clerk of the Office of Ephemeral Holdings against the Office of Temporal Modulation, which reads in its entirety: The thing I was complaining about has not yet happened, but I am confident it will. The petition was accepted. It is still open.

The Office maintains no backlog, in the sense that every petition is answered; it maintains instead a separate accumulation of one thousand four hundred and six replies deferred pending the petitioner's clarification of which floor they mean. The accumulation is called the Unresolved Stair, and a fortnightly reading of the least-recently-touched entries is held in the western annex. Attendance is not compulsory, and has not fallen below full since the reading's institution.

Disputes with the Office of Ceremonial Consistency

The longest-running disagreement in the Office's history concerns precedence at the opening of petitions. The Office of Ceremonial Consistency, which absorbed the Office of Ceremonial Integrity under the reforms of the Sixth Librarianate, holds that any petition touching ceremonial matter must be opened by a Ceremonial officer before an Ombudsman's clerk breaks the seal. The Ombudsman's Office holds that this is a delay, and cites Annex 9, clause 11: "no petition shall wait upon ceremony."

Matters came to a head in the winter of the year the spur was re-roofed, when a petition from Floor 7 (the Floor of Small Grievances) sat unopened for nineteen days pending the attendance of a Ceremonial officer who had been seconded to the Office for the Management of Perpetual Affairs and could not be recalled. The clerk who received it, one Halvard Ness, entered in the margin a note that has since been reproduced in the training primer:

"The petitioner has been back four times. The fourth time she brought chairs for us both. I have explained that the chairs are not the ceremony. She says they are her chairs and she will decide."

— Marginal note, Register vol. 171, entry 22, Office of the Ombudsman

Eleventh Concordance, Annex 14 subsequently clarified that chairs brought by petitioners remain the petitioner's property, and are not to be entered as ceremonial furnishings. The precedent is cited nowhere else.

Scholarly disagreement

The chief point of contention in the literature concerns whether the Office of the Ombudsman is an office at all, in the sense used by the Office of Primary Determinations, or a standing occasion for complaint — the phrase is Librarian Osme's, from the marginalia to her recension of the Concordance. The argument turns on whether a body that decides nothing can be said to determine anything.

The Office of Orthodoxy takes the view that the Office is a determinative body in substance, since the choice of which office to forward a petition to is itself a determination; on this reading, the Office has been operating without proper certification since its amalgamation, and ought to be re-registered under the Office of Provisional Geometry as a body of uncertain outline. The counter-position, advanced at length in the Proceedings of the Dust Abatement Office of the following decade, is that an office which only passes along a grievance is a conduit, and conduits are not offices but pipework, and pipework is the concern of the Floor Stewards and no one else. Neither reading has been adopted. The matter is currently before the Ombudsman's Office, which has registered the complaint and forwarded it to the Office of Orthodoxy.

Premises

The spur's petition window stands open from the second bell after the lamps are lit until the first bell after noon, and is closed on the anniversary of the amalgamation, when the register is read aloud in its entirety by rotation. The window is 58 cm wide, which accommodates a petitioner and one supporting document. Petitioners bringing more than one document are asked to return with the rest on the morrow.

Visitors are reminded that the western stair is one-way downward.

See also

• Office of Verification
• Office of Catalogic Logistics
• Eleventh Concordance
• Office of the Custodian