skit #71: an error corrected in seven steps

After long hours, he finally looked up.

1.038 and 1.000.
1.038. But then 1.000.
1.038. 1.000.

Triple-checking changed nothing. The readout looked wrong and felt wrong. The discrepancy did not seem trivial.

'Errrrr, huh...' he reasoned then conceded, '... ... ... murhhhh.'

Mr Vibler breathed shallowly, then not at all. His fellow clerks shuffled documents with rote assiduity, and none noticed him grow so very reticent and so very remote. Everything paused, everything nullified. His heart pumped no blood and his wiles contrived no excuses. He remained transfixed and tacit long enough to dupe a mortician, as brittle and still as frost-frocked grass. The error and its father lapsed into the moment; the moment distended into an eternity; the eternity afforded Mr Vibler ages to wallow in the comprehension of his folly.

It felt as much like absence as anything can.

Over years of crusades and alms-collection, the Vatican accrued the unwieldy and superfluous affluence as was pre-ordained by the Divine Will, giving the nation a preliminary taste of its due heavenly riches. Even the Vatican had water bills to pay and stock portfolios to play. Its financial bureau operated under gaggle of meticulous treasury stewards, maintaining its tidy fortune. Every task of its stewardship laid predicated in the infallible recipes of procedural manuals. All the stewards, including Mr Vibler, concurred errors arose only when one deviated from the steps; all errors were accidental or intentional. The same dreary work which sedated Mr Vibler wholly preoccupied his coworkers, so when he lapsed in to a guilt-ridden stasis, none noticed. Even he did not know whether he deviated accidentally or intentionally.

Here is how he went about his correction.

And Mr Vibler printed a copy of the Employee's Handbook. He furtively thumbed through APPENDIX 4C-05: MISHAP MITIGATION. Company policy transformed his error into a manageable liability. The Handbook illuminated the corporate ethics of what was right and and what was wrong, as easily understood as day and night.

And Mr Vibler sobbed. Tears blurred his sight, obfuscating the text's from inanely bureaucratic to utterly unintelligible. Staging a diversion, he ruffled papers meaninglessly until he regained composure. Between his welled eyes and the bewept linoleum, Mr Vibler read through the consequences to be executed by the managerial staff with highly professional stoicism, sniffling only inaudibly.

And Mr Vibler made a great mound of APPENDIX 4C-05 upon his desk. His puddled tears were behind him, and he was ready to comply with the Steward's Code. He completed form after form, populating all the fallow fields with admissions of guilt in green ink, signing a pointed thicket of signatures, completing every leaf of paper flawlessly.

And Mr Vibler reflected on how insignificant his error seemed, a mere difference of 0.038. While the Vatican was powerful, it was neither the only religion nor the only business. Among all the figures all the world's accountants considered each day, how little 0.038 mattered. But the very economy that eclipsed Mr Vibler's piddling 0.038 was itself made of such 0.038s. And precisely its contribution to this summation obligated Mr Vibler to represent the 0.038 he brought into this world.

And Mr Vibler floated through the sea of stewards whom he, though a steward himself for so long, hardly recognized, nor they him. Their cold hearts mustered lukewarm adieus and their glassy eyes indifferently watched him drift away into a blue distance. Something abstractly amniotic about salaried positions attracted both the thoroughly bland and the timidly eccentric. Cradled by the ebb and flow of corporate finance, most stewards were happy as clams. Others suffocated in its monotonous tides.

And Mr Vibler trod through the Vatican's corridors, the 4C-05 tucked under his musky armpit. He trod past the groundskeepers suffering great burdens, past the chittering of idle receptionists, past the braying of middle management, past a plethora of unmet persons with unknown purposes, past couriers, chefs, comptrollers, security, past unending diversities. Of all the multifarious departments, only one could properly address his 4C-05. He slipped the manila folder into the mailslot of HR. In his explication, from one human being to another, he begged for sympathy.

And Mr Vibler was released from his duties later that evening by a unanimous executive vote. The Vatican went on without him. To today, Mr Vibler wished he had kept the error to himself.