Brass That Polishes Itself

On the Quiet Persistence of Unnecessary Duties

The brass nameplate on the door of the Department of Internal Coordination had not been touched by a human hand in three years, yet it gleamed with a fierce, oily luster. It reflected the fluorescent lights of the corridor with an intensity that suggested it was generating its own illumination, a small sun trapped in metal. I stood before it, holding a clipboard that felt absurdly heavy, not because of the paper it held, but because of the weight of the assumption that I was there to do something specific. The assumption was the only thing holding the clipboard upright. The department existed to coordinate internal matters, a mandate that had been fulfilled, in fact, by the very act of its creation. Once the coordination was complete, the department remained, which is to say the coordination continued, now directed at itself.

I entered the office. The air was cool and smelled faintly of ozone and old coffee, a scent that seemed to have settled into the drywall rather than the people. A woman sat at a desk that was not a desk but a long, polished slab of laminate, her posture rigid, her eyes fixed on a screen that displayed a progress bar. The bar was moving, slowly, from left to right. It was at forty percent. It had been at forty percent for six hours. She did not blink. She did not check the time. She simply watched the bar, her finger hovering over a key that did nothing. This was the work. The work was the watching. The watching was the proof that the work was being done.

I asked her what the progress bar represented. She looked at me with a pleasant, vacant smile, the kind one reserves for a child who has asked why the sky is blue. “It represents the completion of the previous phase,” she said, her voice soft and even. “And the preparation for the next.” I asked what the previous phase was. She said it was the assessment of the need for the current phase. I asked what the current phase was. She said it was the documentation of the assessment. I asked what the documentation was for. She said it was for the archive. I asked who would read the archive. She said no one, but that was fine, because the act of archiving was the satisfaction of the mandate. The mandate was to archive. The archive was the satisfaction. The satisfaction was the mandate. It was a perfect circle, smooth and frictionless, like the brass nameplate.

I moved to the next room. Here, a man was standing by a window, looking out at the street. He was not looking at the traffic or the pedestrians. He was looking at the reflection of the window in a puddle on the pavement. He held a notebook and a pen. Every time a car passed, he wrote something down. I leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing. It was the time. He was writing the time every time a car passed. I asked what he was doing. He said he was monitoring the flow of vehicular traffic to ensure it remained within acceptable parameters. I asked what the acceptable parameters were. He said they were defined by the previous monitoring cycle. I asked who defined the previous monitoring cycle. He said it was the department. I asked what the department was monitoring. He said it was the definition of the parameters. It was a loop, tight and unbreakable, like a snake eating its own tail, or a mirror reflecting a mirror.

I walked through the corridors, past offices where people were typing, printing, filing, and shredding. The sound was a low hum, a mechanical breathing that filled the space. There was no urgency, no panic, no sense of crisis. There was only the steady, rhythmic pulse of activity. Activity for its own sake. The department was not solving problems. It was creating the conditions in which problems could be perceived as solved. It was a machine that produced the feeling of progress, even when nothing was moving. The brass nameplate gleamed. The progress bar moved. The man wrote the time. The woman watched the screen. They were all doing their jobs. They were all being efficient. They were all being productive. And they were all doing absolutely nothing.