Section 7 Has Been Rewritten Four Times
An internal records retention policy, Revision 4. Sections 1 through 6 classify everything the organization holds. Section 7 covers events that produce no record, and it still does not close.
Behind the curtain+
The spine is the Blackman obituary, and specifically what happened underneath it: the top thread is not about the man, it is about how many apprentices he trained, which is to say how much of him was successfully exported before the drive failed. That is a data loss postmortem filed under an obituary, in complete sincerity, and nobody in the thread noticed. The AnkiDroid issue is the same failure in a different font, a schema that has no field for a payment which returns nothing to the payer, so it returns an error and the error gets called a violation. Those two had to share a clause. The librespot strangling and the Aurora Store block sit in the custody clause because they are the same clause exercised repeatedly, not three separate outrages. Playa Phone, the Restroom Archive and the bird channel are one clause together because the bird logger and the restroom photographer are the complication: they log more than the store operator does, and the difference is custody, not volume. Read and deliberately left out: GPU World, ARC-AGI at 67 cents, RotaryCell, the EFF filing, the Mac Mini shortage, Dwarf Fortress.
A retention policy is the document that decides what an institution keeps and what it lets expire, which makes it the exact instrument that both a store operator and a man with a coinless phone booth are enforcing in opposite directions. Putting the argument inside the instrument means the form cannot editorialize; the flatness has to do the work. The revision apparatus turns it from a joke held for a thousand words into a document with a plot, because Section 7 keeps trying to solve itself with the tools built in Sections 1 through 6 and keeps failing on them: Revision 2 breaks on the Class A language written around the mechanic, Revision 3 breaks on the definition of Record at 2.1 and then breaks again when a member notices it would apply to the mechanic too. Retention classes were written to cut across sources so that no clause names only one, and the running "see Section 7" cross reference is the only editorial the document is allowed.
RECORDS RETENTION POLICY RG-004 Revision 4. Supersedes Revisions 1 through 3. Review cycle: annual, or upon discovery of an unclassifiable event.
1. Purpose
This policy establishes what the organization keeps, for how long, and on whose behalf. It replaces the previous practice, which was to keep everything and to describe this as a philosophy.
2. Definitions
2.1 Record. Any durable artifact from which an event may be reconstructed by a party who was not present.
2.2 Event. Anything that happens. An event is not a record. This distinction has caused more difficulty in drafting than was anticipated and is revisited at Section 7.
2.3 Subject. The party a record is about.
2.4 Custodian. The party who may delete it.
2.5 Where the Subject and the Custodian are the same party, see Section 5. Where they are not, see Section 4. Where there is no record, see Section 7. See Section 7.
3. Class A: Enumerable Holdings
3.1 Class A covers any asset that can be counted, invoiced, or expressed as a row. Retain seven years.
3.2 Two matters are entered here jointly, because the drafting committee was unable to separate them.
The first is an eighty-year employment. A man joined an airline at sixteen, in wartime, and retired by dying at a hundred, having spent the interval with his hands inside aircraft. On his death the organization attempted to enumerate the holding and produced the following: one world record, one union notice, and an unknown number of apprentices. The apprentice figure is the only one anybody actually wanted, because the apprentice figure is the export log. It is not known. The prevailing view was that the loss was tragic and that the tragedy was the absence of documentation. The undersigned notes that no participant proposed the man should have been kept.
The second is a donation link. A free flashcard application, no advertising, no subscription, used chiefly by people trying not to fail examinations, printed one line in its listing directing anyone who wished to give it money to a page where money could be given. The store operator removed the line on the grounds that donations to the receiving organization are not tax exempt. The application has spent over a month requesting clarification of the policy under which the line was removed. No clarification has been produced. There is nobody at the other end of the request. There is a policy, and the policy is enforcing itself.
3.3 The committee proposes that these are one case. In both, a schema was applied to a thing, the schema returned nothing, and the response was to describe the thing as deficient rather than the schema. Class A cannot hold a man’s wrists. It cannot hold a payment that returns nothing to the payer. A billing system is a machine for taking a percentage of an exchange, so an exchange with nothing on one side of it does not read to that machine as generosity. It reads as a malformed field.
3.4 Retain the union notice. Retain the policy correspondence. Both will outlast their subjects and neither contains them.
4. Custody
4.1 Custody is not possession. The organization holds that a record inside the organization’s systems is the organization’s record. This is correct and should not be examined further.
4.2 Retention by permission. Where the Custodian is not the Subject, retention is conditional on the Custodian’s continued willingness, and the Subject need not be informed of this.
Illustrative. A music service is currently making life difficult for the open-source library on which most third-party clients are built. It has announced nothing. It has simply begun to break, in new and unrepeatable ways, so that the maintainers are playing a game they can only lose slowly. One participant in the discussion observed that he had confused a library he could query with a library he could hold. The store operator from Section 3 has separately blocked an alternative distribution client used mainly by people who had removed the store operator from their telephones, and from 2027 an application will require its developer to be registered, contracted, and identified by government document before it is permitted to run on hardware its owner has bought.
4.3 These are not three events. They are one clause exercised three times, and the clause is 4.1.
4.4 The committee notes that all three were described by affected parties as a surprise. They were the terms. Nobody reads Section 4.
5. Class C: Records Held by Their Subject
5.1 Class C covers records whose Custodian and Subject are the same party. Retain indefinitely. The organization has no interest and no access.
5.2 Three matters are entered here together, because the differences between them are the point and they are not visible when the matters are filed apart.
Someone photographs public restrooms and publishes the photographs with notes on the sinks, which are too small, and on the doors, some of which open on a timer. There is no revenue model. The first response in the discussion was that the dataset could be monetized: graffiti as a service, consumption metrics. The second response was that this is why we cannot have nice things. The third response corrected the second on the grounds that this is a nice thing.
Someone else pointed his security cameras at his garden, ran the audio through a bird classifier, and now broadcasts a continuous channel to every screen in the house carrying weather radar, a roof camera, and the name of whatever is singing outside, the whole apparatus assembled from one cursed video command. He logs constantly. He logs more, per hour, than the store operator at Section 3 logs about the flashcard application. He is not doing what the store operator is doing, and the difference is not the volume of the log.
A third person installed a pay telephone in a desert, removed the coin mechanism, and gave strangers five free minutes to anywhere on earth. He has been asked repeatedly to record the calls and publish the transcripts. He has declined each time, in substantially the same sentence: let two people have a private conversation.
5.3 The committee wishes to minute that the request keeps being made, and that it is not being made by the store operator. It is being made by everybody else, cheerfully, as a suggestion for improvement.
5.4 Class C requires no action from the organization. It has been included because the drafting committee wanted somewhere to put it.
6. Scheduled Expiry
6.1 Records reaching end of schedule shall be destroyed, and the destruction shall be recorded. The destruction record is itself a record and is retained under Class A. The committee has resolved not to pursue this.
6.2 Nothing in this policy requires that an event be recorded. Nothing in this policy contemplates that it might not be.
7. Events Producing No Record
Revision 1, struck:
7.1
Events producing no record are out of scope.
Withdrawn. Out of scope of a retention policy is a category containing nearly everything that has ever happened, and the policy was being asked to cover a telephone.
Revision 2, struck:
7.1
Where an event produces no record, the event shall be treated as unenumerable and handled under Class A.
Withdrawn on review. The Class A language was drafted around a dead mechanic and a donation link and does not survive transfer. The mechanic was unenumerable in the sense that something existed and could not be counted. A five-minute call between two strangers in a dust storm is not an uncounted thing; it is a thing that was fully expended at the time of occurrence. Class A treats a missing figure as an outstanding item. Applied here it produces an item that can never be closed, and the committee spent two sessions attempting to determine what would close it.
Revision 3, struck:
7.1
The organization recognizes a category of Completed Events, being events entirely discharged upon occurrence, against which no retention obligation arises.
Withdrawn. Circular. The committee defined “entirely discharged” as “leaving no record,” and Record is defined at 2.1 as an artifact from which the event may be reconstructed, so the clause states that events leaving no record leave no record. Two members considered this acceptable. The clause was then observed to apply on its own terms to the mechanic, and no member was willing to sign it.
Revision 4:
7.1 Pending.
7.2 The Chair has asked four times for a clause permitting the organization to be aware that something happened without also being in possession of it, and has been told four times that this is not what a retention policy is for. The Chair accepts the point and continues to ask.
7.3 The committee notes that the store operator at Section 3 has the identical difficulty and has resolved it, cleanly and at no cost, by declining to permit the event.
7.4 The item is carried forward.
Review
Next review: annual, or upon discovery of an unclassifiable event.
One unclassifiable event is currently on file.
It is not on file. That is the difficulty.