The project manager had the practised calm of someone who spends their life negotiating with deadlines. We shook hands across a desk with a neat stack of barcodes in one corner and a roll of cotton tape in the other.
“Mercer says you like anomalies,” she said. “I don't like them,” I said. “I notice them. And I move them off other people's desks.”
“What would you do here?” “Three things,” I said. “First, intake triage — catch misfiles before they burn hours. Second, metadata normalisation where it's cheapest. Third, a short ‘miscellaneous’ protocol: anything that clearly doesn't belong gets logged, imaged, and routed; nothing walks, nothing vanishes.”
“Timeline?” “Two weeks on trial. If I'm not saving you time by day three, you cut me at close of play Friday.”
She held my eye. “Why do you want this?” “Because I like clean archives,” I said, and let the silence do some of the heavy lifting. “And because I'm good at making them cleaner, fast.”
She opened a diary. “We're taking Miscellaneous Correspondence upstairs next week,” she said. “If you're still keen, start Monday. You'll shadow intake for a day, then sit on QC. Short contract, renewable. No heroics.”
“No heroics,” I said. “Paper isn't impressed by them.”
We shook on it. In the corridor, the air felt different — cooler, like a door had been opened somewhere. If the twelve leaves were ever going to breathe again, it would be between a trolley and a cradle, under a camera, with three people talking about lunch in the next room.