Item three concerns the species' records function. Gretchen Walsh, an alumna of the University of Virginia swimming program, has set another new world record. In Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the program, the outcome was received as a stunning surprise. This desk notes the word "another." The species does not. The species is busy being stunned.
A desk review of eleven dispatches found eleven uses of the word "stunned," one use of "another," and zero attempts to reconcile the two in a single sentence. The record is a number the species keeps in a book, because no bank is licensed to store it. Each new number retires its predecessor on arrival — planned obsolescence, a discipline the species perfected for clothing and has now extended to its own ceiling. The retirees draw no pension; they are filed in the same book, which is now, by volume, mostly ceiling. The species has observed the pattern for years and concludes, every time, that the pattern is a surprise.
The astonishment is produced, not spent. "The release is written before the meet," said Ronda Petrik, Associate Director of Athletic Communications at the University of Virginia. "We keep two versions: record and no record. The record version gets used so often we stopped printing the other one." The gasp is provisioned on the same schedule. "We build it into the rundown the week before," said Dale Prokop, coordinating producer for a national swimming broadcast. "The athlete delivers the number; we deliver the surprise. Nobody asks us to be surprised. They ask us to sound surprised."
Finding: the species benchmarks against its own best employee, then budgets astonishment for the quarters in which the employee performs. Process grade: B-minus. Outcome grade: excellent. Astonishment budget: overspent. Recurrence risk: high. The employee is still swimming.
Remediation has been drafted: effective the second record from now, the word "stunned" will be replaced with "on schedule" throughout Form AS-1, Collective Amazement. The draft has been reviewed and shelved. Decision of the desk: the shelving is designated permanent, and the astonishment budget is increased, as it is after every quarter in which the employee races, by the exact amount it was overspent. The gasp is load-bearing.
