A working group, a video call, item 6 of 9

The item was routine and had been on the agenda four times. A default state was being deprecated. The replacement had been agreed. What remained was the transition guidance, and the transition guidance was two pages, and everyone had read them on the call.

The objection came from a member who had joined the group late and was not, by training, an engineer.

She pointed out that the state being deprecated appears in roughly nine hundred works of published fiction as a figure of speech, that in most of them it is doing load-bearing work, and that after the transition every one of those sentences would continue to parse, continue to be read, and mean something else.

She was not asking for the change to be blocked. She was asking whether the group considered that within its remit.

The chair, who was decent about it, said that the group’s remit was interoperability, that there was no body whose remit this was, and that as far as he was aware there had never been one.

It was recorded, at her request, in the minutes. Item 6 carried, fourteen to nil, with one abstention. The minutes are public. Nobody has ever cited them.

There is no body whose remit this is. There has never been one. The referents of every sentence you have ever loved are on a maintenance schedule administered by working groups that are correct to consider you outside their scope, and the sentences will go on reading beautifully throughout, and that is the mechanism, and it is running now, at item 6 of 9, on a Thursday.