Standard Weights Amp Measures Bureau

The Standard Weights Amp Measures Bureau is a standing sub-office of the Bureau of Standard Measures, constituted under Instrument 9 of the Ordinance of Standard Measures for the single purpose of storing, marking, and occasionally defending the Tower's primary reference standards. It occupies two adjoining rooms on Floor 347, one of them a converted stair-landing, and holds no certification authority of its own: the Seventh Concordance vests certification in the parent Bureau, and the Amp Measures Bureau is forbidden by its founding instrument from certifying anything, including its own stationery. The "Amp" in its name is not a contraction of any word in standard use. It appears in the constituting instrument without explanation and has been retained in every recension since.

Mandate and holdings

The Bureau's holdings consist principally of the primary standards themselves, which are not to be removed from the landing under any circumstance short of fire, flood, or the visit of a Librarian of the First Bench. The inventory has remained substantially unchanged since the third recension:

• Eleven standard weights of first citation, adjusted to the base weight of 1.0 TTW in accordance with the Tome of Jurisprudential Weights and Measures;
• a set of Minor Weights bounded at the upper limit of 0.29 units, held in a shallow drawer lined with unbleached linen;
• one Standard Fathom of Resonance, custody of which is shared, awkwardly, with the Department of Ontological Weights and Measures;
• fourteen interval markers in the care of the Chamber of Silent Measures, of which nine return on request;
• a sealed crate of disputed standards, marked do not weigh, whose contents are listed only as "assorted."

Weighing is conducted on a balance of second citation that has not been adjusted since Floor 347 was renumbered, an event the Bureau declines to date precisely. A note pasted inside the balance lid, in the hand of an unidentified clerk of the fourth recension, reads: "If the beam hesitates, wait. It is not hesitating. That is the weight."

The naming dispute

The Bureau is routinely confused with the Bureau of Ontological Weights and Measures, and it is understood within the parent Bureau that this confusion is deliberate on the part of the Ontologists. Both bodies occupy rooms on Floor 347, separated by a corridor that the Ontologists describe as a jurisdictional boundary and the Amp Measures Bureau describes as a corridor. In the winter of the year the Bureau designates 347/11, a junior clerk of the Ontologists, one Aurel Sabran, carried a set of qualia weights through the corridor without a transit chit. The Amp Measures Bureau's doorkeeper, Perrine Ost — a woman of fixed habits and a fixed opinion of Ontologists — refused her entry, citing Instrument 9, clause 4(c), which she had memorised. Sabran cited the Eleventh Concordance, which she had not. The matter went to adjudication and was settled by a ruling that neither side accepted and both now cite.

"A weight that cannot be weighed is a weight nevertheless, but it is not a weight of this Bureau."

— Seventh Concordance, Annex 4, marginal ruling of the adjudicator Corin Vale

The Ontologists maintain that the ruling vindicates them. The Amp Measures Bureau maintains that the ruling was written in its margin, and therefore in its favour. The corridor is now divided by a painted line applied at the Ontologists' expense. Ost's successor repaints it every spring without being asked.

Relation to the Directorate

The Amp Measures Bureau reports to the Bureau of Standard Measures and, through it, to the Directorate of Primary Measures, which is a subsidiary bureau of the Department of Ontological Weights and Measures. This arrangement is not contested, though the Amp Measures Bureau's clerks observe that it places them, in the chain of correspondence, beneath an office with which they are in dispute. Paperwork between the two rooms is accordingly carried by hand, on foot, along the outside of the building, in all weathers. An internal minute of 347/14 records that the route takes eleven minutes and four seconds in snow, and that a second route through the corridor takes forty seconds and is not used. No reason is given in the minute, and none is required.

Recalibration and the Bureau of Metrological Purity

Recalibration against the Tower's reference standards is carried out twice yearly by inspectors of the Bureau of Metrological Purity, whose findings are forwarded to the Bureau of Objective Measures for filing. The Amp Measures Bureau has lodged objections to every inspection report since the practice began, on the grounds that the inspectors weigh the standards rather than the standards weighing themselves — an objection the Bureau has never fully explained and has never withdrawn. The objection is filed in duplicate, and one copy is kept in the sealed crate. The crate is not weighed.

Controversy

The Bureau contends that the upper boundary for Minor Weights, which the Bureau of Ontological Weights and Measures sets at 0.29 units, was established by an Ontological recension and has no standing in the Amp Measures Bureau's own registers, which show a boundary of 0.31. The Ontologists hold that the Tome of Jurisprudential Weights and Measures settles the matter and that the Amp Measures Bureau's registers are, in their words, "behind the times by two points." The parent Bureau has taken no position. It has, however, taken a room: the disputed standards in the crate are said to fall between 0.29 and 0.31, and it has been suggested — by no one with authority to suggest it — that the crate should be opened and the question settled in an afternoon. Every keeper since the third recension has declined, on the grounds that the crate has not been weighed.