Sanitary Directive Fog-α

Scope and issuance

Sanitary Directive Fog-α is a standing instrument of the Department of Sanitary Logistics, issued originally to govern the movement of particulate matter between Floor 712 and Floor 71. It survives in three recensions, of which the second is the only version currently enforced; the first was superseded following the moisture anomalies of the Forty-First Quietude, and the third was never ratified but is nonetheless cited with some regularity by clerks who have not read it. The Directive's operative clause requires that all personnel exiting Floor 712 submit to a de-gritting rinse on Floor 71 before proceeding to any adjacent landing. The rinse is mandatory. Personnel who decline are not turned back; they are entered in the register of unprocessed exits and remain there until a supervisor's signature resolves them, which in practice means they remain there.

Superseded recension

The earlier Sanitary Directive Fog-α mandated the use of a citrus-based degreaser for the initial pass. This formulation was abandoned after inspectors attached to the Office of Cyclical Review correlated its use with a measurable rise in ambient moisture across the intervening shafts. The degreaser, being applied at intervals of roughly forty minutes per shift, left a residue that the ventilation of the period could not lift; the result was a persistent damp on landings that had been dry for as long as anyone could establish. The anomaly was not immediately blamed on the Directive. For two seasons it was attributed to the Damp Stairwell, whose habits were well known and generally accepted. It was the clerk Hesper Aldecoan of the Department of Sanitary Logistics who, in a memorandum of the winter following, demonstrated by simple tally that the damp tracked the rinse schedule exactly. Aldecoan's memorandum was received without comment and the formulation was withdrawn the following month.

Relation to Sanitary Code 44-A

The Directive operates under the general authority of Sanitary Code 44-A, which is administered by the Department of Structural Verifications. The overlap between the two instruments has never been entirely settled. Sanitary Code 44-A governs unaccounted-for moisture and the traversal of the Damp Stairwell; Sanitary Directive Fog-α governs particulate transfer and, by extension, the water used to accomplish it. Each document's preamble claims seniority over the other, and the two claims are reconciled only in an annex neither office acknowledges reading. Under the reconciliation of record, the rinse is treated as a discharge event and therefore falls to be reported under Sanitary Code 44-A as moisture of unknown origin unless the rinse log for the shift is complete. Rinse logs for Floor 71 are complete on average one day in nine. On the remaining days the water is recorded as unaccounted for, which satisfies the Code without satisfying anyone. Visitors unfamiliar with the arrangement occasionally ask why the rinse occurs on Floor 71 rather than on Floor 712 itself. The answer recorded in the Directive's commentary is that Floor 712 lacks drainage; the answer recorded in the margins of the commentary, in a hand matching no known clerk, is that it was tried once.

Re-suspension and cataloguing

Grit removed by the rinse is collected, dried, and forwarded to the Stacks of Unfinished Sentences, who jointly with the Chamber of Unfinished Symphonies are responsible for the cataloguing of the Fog of Unfinished Thoughts. The Stacks take the position that re-suspended fog particulate constitutes a finding and must be entered as such; the Chamber holds that a finding requires intention and that grit has none. The dispute has been referred upward twice and returned both times with a request for a firmer measurement of the grit. Until that measurement arrives, the material is stored in trays on an anteroom shelf of Floor 71 under a label reading, in full, "particulate, character pending." The trays are emptied quarterly, or when the shelf becomes load-bearing, whichever occurs first.

Citation practice

Citation of the Directive is common in disputes where it is not relevant, precisely because its three recensions permit a speaker to select the version that suits them. A clerk wishing to compel a rinse cites the current recension; a clerk wishing to avoid one cites the third, which was never ratified and therefore, in the argument, was never not in force. The Librarians have declined on two occasions to declare which recension governs, noting that the question falls outside the scope of their catalogue. Both refusals are recorded, dated, and themselves citable, which has not improved the situation. Visiting personnel are reminded that the rinse involves standing water and that shoes left on the wet side of the partition will not be dry by the end of the shift.