The sorter is a loop of tilt trays that reads every parcel's label and tips it down the right chute, and it logs every tip. Every night at ten past four it logs a tip into chute nineteen. There is no chute nineteen. It was taken out when the building was reconfigured and the gap is plated over. The parcel is not on the sorter afterwards and it is not on the plate and it is not anywhere.
I am the sorter engineer at a parcel hub, and the sorter is the building. Everything else is walls.
What it does.
A loop of tilt trays, about six hundred of them, going round at two metres a second. A parcel is put on a tray, a camera reads the label, the system decides which chute it goes to, and when the tray passes that chute it tilts and the parcel slides down into a cage. Every tilt is logged: tray number, chute, time, parcel barcode.
At ten past four every night, a tray tilts into chute nineteen.
Chute nineteen.
There were forty chutes when the building opened. In 2015 the layout was changed and nineteen was removed. The opening in the sorter deck was plated over and welded and the software was told there were thirty nine chutes, and there has not been a nineteen since.
The log says a tray tilts at nineteen. The tilt is a real thing, a solenoid firing, and the solenoid at that position was taken out with the chute. The plate is a plate. There is no mechanism there.
The parcel is real. It has a barcode, it was scanned in off a lorry, it was put on a tray by a person, and when the tray gets to the plate it tilts, and the parcel goes off the tray, and it is not on the plate, and it is not on the deck, and it is not under the sorter, where I have looked with a torch every night for a month.
What has been checked.
The software, with the makers, who have confirmed that nineteen does not exist in the configuration and that the log is logging a tilt at a chute that is not there, which they described as impossible and then stopped answering emails about.
The tray. Different tray each night. Whatever tray the parcel is on.
The parcel. Different each night. Random, by the look of it. A shoe box, a document envelope, a small heavy thing from a tool company. No pattern in the sender or the destination. They are all, after ten past four, missing, and they are all, in the tracking system, shown as delivered, at a time about a day later, to their address, and signed for, and the customers do not complain, and I have rung two, and they had the parcel, and they had signed for it, and one of them described the driver.
The driver.
A man in his fifties, she said. In the old uniform, the one from before the takeover, the brown one. Very polite. She said he had apologised for the delay, and that she had not known there was one.
Who.
A driver in the brown uniform had worked out of this building for twenty years and had, in 2014, the year before the reconfiguration, had a heart attack at the bottom of chute nineteen while clearing a jam, and had been found there by the morning shift under a pile of parcels that had come down on top of him after the jam cleared, and they had taken nineteen out the next year because nobody wanted to work it.
What is done about it.
The ten past four tilt is logged as a phantom divert and the parcel is logged as lost in hub and then, a day later, updates itself to delivered, and the lost in hub figure for this building is one a night better than it should be, and I have had a bonus for it.
What I do.
I keep the sorter running.
I stood at the plate last night at ten past four. The tray came round, the parcel on it, a shoe box. The tray tilted, at a position where there is nothing to make it tilt. The box slid off the tray and onto the plate and, on the plate, it went down. Through it. The way a parcel goes down a chute, the sound of it, the cardboard on the steel, going away below me, into a cage that is not there, in a room that is not there, where a man in a brown uniform who died under a pile of parcels is still clearing the jam, one a night, and delivering them himself, and apologising for the delay.
I put my hand on the plate afterwards. It was warm, and it had the give of a chute lip, and it is steel.
I have asked for nineteen to be put back. There is no business case. I have said it will bring the lost in hub figure up, which is true, and they have asked me why I want that, and I have said that a man should not have to work a chute that has been taken away, and they have put me on a course.