• He refuses to use the internal telephone, preferring
Profile of a Verification to walk sixty yards down the corridor to deliver
Clerk three-word messages in person.
• He eats his lunch out of greaseproof paper while
Observations on twenty-two years at the timber
sitting on a crate behind the boiler.
testing desk.
• He keeps a small brass ruler in his top pocket to
check the margins on incoming memos.
Mr. Hercule Simon sits at the desk closest to the
radiator, where the floorboards dip three inches toward The Theory Concerning Rainwater
the street wall. He has occupied that corner since the It is impossible to work near Mr. Simon for more than
firm moved out of the basement premises above the three days without hearing his opinion on zinc roofing.
tallow refinery, though he rarely mentions the move He believes with absolute certainty that rainwater
unless someone complains about the damp in the filing collected off galvanised zinc sheets causes premature
cabinets. hair loss in men under forty. He has no medical backing
His official title is senior testing assistant, which for this view, nor has he ever produced a document to
means he spends seven hours a day pressing a support it, but he will defend the proposition for forty
two-pronged moisture meter into the ends of sawn minutes if a junior clerk makes the mistake of
spruce boards. If a batch reads above eighteen percent mentioning the gutters. He asserts that the zinc ions
moisture content, he stamps the tally sheet with a heavy react with atmospheric nitrogen in a manner that
rubber stamp that leaves a purple mark shaped like a starves the scalp.
broken wheel. If you point out that three men in the cutting yard
He is fifty-eight years old, though he has looked have full heads of hair despite drinking water from the
roughly sixty-two since he first took the job. zinc cistern for twenty years, he simply shakes his head
and says they are exceptions that prove the rule. Arguing
Daily Routines and Habits with him is like pushing against a sack of oats.
The first thing anyone notices about Mr. Hercule Simon He is equally stubborn about the office windows. He
is the tin. It is a small rectangular tin that once insists that opening the sash more than two inches
contained menthol lozenges, though he now fills it with creates a draught that ruins the calibration of the
hard liquorice sweets he buys in half-pound paper bags balance scales, even though the scales have been housed
from the corner shop. Every forty-five minutes, without in a glass case for forty years.
looking up from his ledger, he draws the tin from his
vest pocket and taps it twice against the knuckle of his An Unobserved Gesture
left thumb before sliding the lid back. Nobody in the main office likes him particularly. He is
The tapping sound is sharp enough to cut through dry, opinionated, and smells faintly of camphor and wet
the noise of the electric typewriter in the next office. If wool whenever the weather turns damp.
you ask him to stop, he nods once, puts the tin away, Yet there is one detail about his morning routine that
and then does it again forty-five minutes later as if the he has managed to keep quiet for six years.
conversation had never occurred. The night watchman who guards the timber yards is
He drinks four cups of black tea every shift out of a seventy-two and suffers from severe stiffness in his hip.
thick green earthenware mug with a chipped handle. He The watchman’s hut is heated by a small paraffin burner
refuses to let anyone else wash this mug. At twenty past that boils dry around six in the morning. Every day at
twelve, he carries it to the brass tap in the yard, rinses it twenty to eight, twenty minutes before the rest of the
with cold water, wipes the rim with a grey cotton staff arrive, Mr. Hercule Simon carries a two-litre tin of
handkerchief, and sets it upside down on his blotter to lamp oil across the yard and fills the reservoir while the
dry. watchman is inside the gatehouse turning off the alarm.
He claims warm water degrades the glaze, which is nonsense. He does not leave a note. He does not mention it to
the office manager. When the watchman once asked
• He wears the same grey wool waistcoat regardless of him who was topping up the burner, Mr. Simon told
the season. him it was probably the maintenance boy clearing out
• He keeps three sharpened pencils lined up parallel to old stock from the cellar.
the inkwell. He then went back to his desk, took out his tin,
tapped it twice on his thumb knuckle, and spent the
1
next twenty minutes complaining that the tea bags were
two grams lighter than they used to be five years ago.
He is not a pleasant man to share a room with, but
the floorboards under his desk are swept cleaner than
any other corner of the building.