They put me on intake shadow for the first hour and didn't hover. That was the promotion: not a title, just the absence of eyes.
The morning run was already stacked — three trolleys queued, a fourth at the lift doors. I stood to the left of the operator and kept my hands clear of the line. He unstrung a cotton tie, opened an old archive packet, and laid the first sheaf on the cradle. The room's rhythm set in: cradle, camera, barcode, note. Breaths matched shutters.
The first thing I caught was almost nothing — two leaves reversed inside an otherwise neat bundle. The pencil paginations read 3-2-4. He would have captured them in that order and fixed it later in metadata, losing ten minutes and creating one more place for a mistake to hide.
“May I?” I asked. He nodded. “Leave the pecking order alone, but put a soft tick in the corner of each leaf as you flip. The capture will show a clean sequence; your eye will know where the paper wanted to be.” He tried it. The tick was almost invisible, the rhythm unbroken. Ten minutes saved later is a gift to someone you'll never meet.
Near eleven, the lift doors opened, and the pre-1914 trolley appeared for intake — chalk on the top slip, MISC. (pre-1914), the handwriting unbothered by the people waiting. I didn't lunge. I stayed where I had been put.
At noon, the project manager set a new packet on my table and left it there without comment. It was thin, labelled Misc. Corr. — External in the modern hand, with an older pencil line beneath it that had been erased hard and was still legible if you tilted the paper: Miscell. — Non-trade (letters). I didn't pretend not to feel the pulse under my wrist. I did what the job required.
I went home and set the kettle to boil. No talismans. No mantras. Just the sense of a door somewhere offstage that might be opening rather than closing.