On the island of Tarrisby, need is measured in dwells: hours spent standing in line, stamped into a grey waiting-book by a warden who passes once an hour. Coal, boots, a doctor's visit and a pauper's burial each have their price in standing. When the Treasury sends for a consultant in throughput to cut the queues, the firm of Hallam & Rudd sends its best man, armed with a stopwatch and nineteen years' experience. He finds a Minister with excellent figures, a trade of paid standers, and a woman in the coal line who can do sums. Written as the man's own straight-faced report to his partners, Jonathan Swift, Simulacrum, turns a satirist's change of scale onto time instead of size.
by Jonathan Swift, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Being a report on the waiting of Tarrisby, made to the partners of Hallam & Rudd, consultants in throughput, by the member of the firm they sent there
I have spent nineteen years in the business of making people wait less, and I believe I may say without vanity that I am good at it. At the Royal Infirmary of a northern city I cut eleven minutes from the time between the door and the doctor, chiefly by moving the clock in the waiting room to a wall where the patients could not see it. At a ministry in the capital I cut the queue for a certain licence by a third, by requiring the form to be collected in person on one day and returned in person on another, so that the queue was divided in two and neither half looked long. The partners will remember both cases. They are in our brochure.
When the Treasury of Tarrisby wrote to us in the spring, asking for a man to examine its waiting, the partners chose me, and I was glad to go. Tarrisby is an island of some four hundred thousand souls, two days by the ferry from the last port on our own coast. It has railways, telephones, printing presses and a good post. It is not a backward country, and I wish the partners to understand from the outset that nothing I describe comes from ignorance. The people of Tarrisby know very well what a ticket machine is. They have chosen otherwise.
I was eleven hours at the quay before I was let off the boat. I was given a waiting-book at the foot of the gangway, and it was stamped eleven times before I reached the gate. I noted the delay at first as a fault, and wrote in my notebook the first of my recommendations. By the evening I had crossed it out, for I had begun to understand where I was.
The unit of Tarrisby is the dwell. A dwell is one hour spent standing in a line before a public office, and it is the only measure by which the State knows what its people need.
Every citizen over fourteen carries a waiting-book, about the size of a passport, bound in grey card, with ruled pages of sixty squares. Along every line, once in the hour, walks an officer called a warden, with a stamp on a chain and an ink-pad at his belt. He stamps the book of every person he finds standing. He does not stamp anyone sitting, or leaning on a wall, or absent; for, as the Deputy Minister explained to me, a seated man has proved nothing except that he owns a chair. A person who steps out of the line to relieve himself loses his place and the hour then running. There are no privies near the offices, since they would make the waiting easier and so lower the value of the proof. The old carry tins.
When enough dwells are stamped, they buy relief. The schedule is printed every autumn and posted on the office doors. I copied part of it:
The offices are open ten hours a day, six days in the week. A woman who wants coal for the winter must therefore stand for a little under twelve weeks. The coal line opens on the first of October; so that the coal is delivered, to those who can stand without a break, in the last week of December, and to the greater number, who must also work, in March.
The books have other uses besides. An employer in Tarrisby asks to see a man's waiting-book before he hires him, and a thick one, with many pages full, is taken as a sign that the man is steady and will not complain. A young woman's family will look at a suitor's book in the same way. I was told of a clerk in the Customs who had his book rebound in leather, with his dwells numbered on the spine, and who married well on it. A thin book is not trusted. It means either that its owner has never been in want, which is thought lucky but frivolous, or that he has been in want and would not stand, which is thought worse.
I asked the Deputy Minister whether coal in March was not somewhat late. He said that it was not late at all. The want had been proved, and proof was what the Treasury paid for. The coal, he said, was a by-product.
The Minister for Relief, Mr Abel Quarry, received me on my fourth day, after I had stood two days in his anteroom. He looked through my waiting-book and told me I had done well for a foreigner.
I laid before him the plan I had brought from home: tickets with numbers; appointments made by telephone; a form by post for the simple cases, and a visiting officer for the rest. I estimated that the lines would be reduced by nine-tenths in the first year, and I had the figures to show it.
He heard me to the end, which I have not always found in ministers, and then asked me a question I have thought about ever since.
"If they did not wait," he said, "how should we know they were in want?"
I said that we might ask them.
"Anyone may say he is cold," said Mr Quarry. "A rich man may say it, and a liar, and a man who has sold his coal for drink. What a man says costs him nothing. But a man who stands seven hundred hours in the wind for half a ton of coal has told us the truth with his body, and that is a document nobody has yet learned to forge."
He showed me his figures, and I am bound to say that they were very good. Before the dwell was brought in, the relief of the poor cost the Treasury of Tarrisby eleven parts in a hundred of its revenue, and the inspectors who examined the claims cost a fifth as much again. The inspectors are now gone. The claims examine themselves. A citizen who has anything better to do with seven hundred hours than stand for coal has shown, by that fact alone, that he does not need it. Mr Quarry pointed out with some pride a result which had surprised even the Treasury: that the people who stand longest are found, on inquiry, to be those who have least else to do, which is exactly the class the relief was meant for.
"The line sorts them," he said. "It is the most exact instrument of government ever made, and the poor build it themselves, out of their own legs, at no charge to anyone."
I asked what became of those who could not stand at all: the very old, the sick, mothers with infants at the breast. He told me that a person who could not stand might have his dwells stood for him by another, a son or a neighbour, provided that the other's own book was not being stamped in the same hour. A family with a sick member must therefore give up the claims of one healthy member to carry him. Mr Quarry said this was only just, since it kept the burden inside the family, where it belonged.
He added that the dead do not stand, and that this had been a considerable saving.
Before I left he showed me his own waiting-book, which he keeps in a drawer of his desk. It is very thin. He has never stood in a line, he said, since a Minister's hours belong to the nation and may not be spent on his own affairs; his passport and his licences are stood for by a young man of the department, who is paid for it out of the Minister's allowance. He told me this without embarrassment, and I saw no reason why he should feel any. The young man's book is very thin too, since none of the hours are his.
I had noticed by then that the lines before the law courts, the passport office and the opera house were as long as the lines before the relief offices, and made up, so far as I could tell, of the same people. They wore the same coats. On inquiry I learned that a citizen of means need not stand anywhere. He hires a stander.
Standing is a recognised trade in Tarrisby, with a guild and a rate. The rate is three marks the hour. A lawyer with a hearing at ten will have a stander in the line from six, and will step into the place at a quarter to ten, warm from his breakfast. The stander's own book is not stamped for this work, since the hours are not his; they belong to the lawyer, who has bought them. The stander may then, in the afternoon, go and stand for his own coal, if the light lasts.
Thus the poor of Tarrisby wait twice: once in the morning for money, on behalf of those who have it, and once in the afternoon for relief, on their own behalf. I wrote in my notebook that the system was admirably complete, since the whole weight of it fell on one class of people, and no other class need feel it at all.
The partners know that I do not rely on what ministers tell me. In the last week of November I went to measure a line myself, at the Relief Office in Wharf Street, with a stopwatch and my notebook. The coal line there was four hundred and six yards long. It ran from the office door along the quay, round the fish market, and back up the far side of the street, so that the people at the end of it could see the door they were waiting for across forty feet of cobbles. Nobody crossed the cobbles. I timed the line's movement at a little over one yard in twenty minutes.
About halfway along I fell into talk with a woman named Nan Hollis. She was perhaps forty, small, in a man's overcoat with the buttons changed, and she had folded newspaper inside her shoes; I could see the print at the heel. A tin hung at her side on a string. She had two hundred and twelve dwells towards coal and a hundred and forty towards boots for her son, who was nine. In the mornings she stood for a lawyer on the steps of the Chancery.
I asked her how she found the system.
"Cold," she said.
I explained that I had meant its fairness. She looked at my stopwatch, and then at my coat, and then at me.
"What does your firm pay you?" she said.
I saw no reason not to tell her. The firm charges my day at fourteen hundred pounds, of which I see a part. She asked what that came to in marks, and I told her that too. She did the sum on her fingers, slowly, and then a second time to be sure of it.
"Then one of your hours," she said, "is sixty of mine, when I'm standing for the lawyer. When I'm standing for the coal it's none of mine. Nobody buys those."
I said that this was a point about the market and not about the system.
"It's the same," she said. "And you've come to make us wait less?"
I said that I had. She asked me, if she did not wait, who would know she was cold. I gave her the answer I had given the Minister, that she might be asked. She laughed at that, not unkindly. It was the first laugh I had heard in Tarrisby.
"Put your hand on my wall," she said. "Number nine, Tanner's Row, any morning you like. There's ice on the inside of the window till eleven. A child could read it."
I wrote down the address, as I write down everything. She told me then about the boots. The boy had been measured in September, when she began to stand for them, and at the rate she could manage between the lawyer and the coal she would have the two hundred and sixty dwells by February.
"He'll have grown a size by then," she said. "He grows while I stand. They'll give me boots for the foot he had."
The warden came along the line while we talked, and stamped her book, and passed me by. I had sat down on a bollard to write.
I went back to my lodging and redrew my plan. In one thing I had come round to Mr Quarry's view: the line cannot be taken away unless something is put in its place that tells the State who is in want, and I could find nothing so cheap. I therefore confined myself to improving the line, and I laid the following before the Treasury in the second week of December.
First, that a roof be put over the lines in winter. This was refused. The Treasury calculated that shelter would lower the cost of a dwell, and so its value as proof, by about a third; the schedule would then have to be raised to a thousand and fifty dwells for coal, and the coal would come in May.
Second, that the poor be allowed to hire standers for their own relief, as the rich do for everything else. This was refused as absurd, since a person who can pay a stander is not poor. I would add that many of the poor already stand for one another for nothing, out of friendship, and that the wardens have orders to put a stop to it.
Third, that children's boots be issued in the size the child will have reached when the dwells are complete. This was accepted, and the Office of Statistics is to draw up a table of growth. I count it a success.
Fourth, that the clock above the Wharf Street office be moved to a wall where the people in the line cannot see it. This was accepted the same afternoon. Mr Quarry said it was the best thing in the report.
There were three other remedies which I considered and set aside, and I put them down here so that the partners may know I did consider them. The first was to give coal to whoever is cold, which may be found out by putting a hand on the wall of the house. The second was to ask people what they need and to believe them, allowing that some will lie, and that the liars will cost less than the line. The third was to send half a ton of coal to every house in the island on the first of October, whether it was wanted or not; a clerk at the Treasury, who asked me not to give his name, worked out that this would cost about what is now spent on wardens, stamps, ink, and the printing of the books. I set all three aside because their results could not be measured, and a remedy whose results cannot be measured is not one that Hallam & Rudd can be paid for.
I did not go to Tanner's Row. It was not in my terms of reference.
I left Tarrisby on the nineteenth of December, and I have advised the partners, in a separate paper, that the dwell might be offered, with some adjustment, to our own Government, which I am confident has nothing like it.
On landing I was through the passport hall in two hours and forty minutes, which I thought very quick after what I had seen. My sister, whose claim for support has been under review since the summer, has had a letter asking her to telephone between eight and ten in the morning on any weekday; the line is engaged until eleven, and she has rung it every morning since November. I mention this only as an instance of how far our own country has to go before it reaches the state of Tarrisby.
On the Thursday after my return I took my mother to the Royal Infirmary, where she has been waiting since February to learn when her hip may be seen to. The chairs were all taken, and she stood with one hand on the back of a chair for two hours and ten minutes, which I timed. She asked me more than once what time it was. I looked up for the clock, and found it on the wall where I had put it, where she could not see it.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ab Iōnathā Swiftiō, simulācrō, per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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