HOA Minutes: The Pencil Case Gets Its Day in Court

Old Business

Mr. Ferreira renewed his standing objection to any tool he did not build himself. The objection was noted and, as always, filed.

Mrs. Kowalczyk then read an item into the record. Brenda came out from under the porch at No. 2, sat facing the Okafor-Lindqvist house for the length of one yawn, and went back under, which Mrs. Kowalczyk read aloud as a sign that something at No. 3 was about to open. The lane's domesticated bear has not been wrong about No. 3, she said, and the minutes will show that no one asked her to prove it. The twins looked at each other and then at the ceiling.

ORACLE asked that the minutes record its mood regarding the agenda, which it described as "mostly Thursday." It then volunteered to chair the autopsy of the twins' robot, and held to the offer until Tamsin pointed out that the robot was not dead. ORACLE said it would keep the offer open for when it was. Mrs. Delacroix-Burke thanked it and assigned the remarks a memo number.

"It's a pencil case with ambitions," Mr.

New Business

Three parties asked to use the Workstation first: Tamsin, as keeper of the repair desk; the twins, who had a small robot with a back panel that would not come off; and Mr. Ferreira, who wished to prove the kit a pencil case. Debate ran four minutes.

Mrs. Delacroix-Burke, a Caucus member who holds that living with a cat is the highest form of human existence, cited the ancient Treaty of the Seven Whiskers, which she said had settled the same question in a lost kingdom by awarding the first use of any instrument to whoever complained about it longest. Mrs. Kowalczyk asked for the citation. The chair said the treaty was kept in the Caucus's oral archive, which is the Admiral, and the Admiral did not wake. Under the Treaty, Mr. Ferreira was found the longest complainer by a wide margin. He accepted the honor the way a man accepts a summons.

He opened the case. The magnetic pad flipped up, and the bits sat in slots shaped like themselves, so an empty slot announces exactly what is missing. He tipped the tray sideways to demonstrate that it was a bad design. The bits stayed where they were. He did not comment, and the secretary notes that he did not comment loudly.

He chose a bit and pressed, and the electric driver popped up out of the case. The twins said "hypothesis" in unison, which the chair ruled was not a motion.

The robot's back panel held tiny screws. Mr. Ferreira set the lower torque, 0.05 N.m, and they came out like a held breath. A stubborn one needed the higher setting, 0.2 N.m. A third, rusted from a summer in the twins' sandbox, would not move on either, so he switched to the manual gear, which goes up to 3 N.m, and turned it with his own wrist. Tamsin remarked that this is the honest limit of the electric modes: they are gentle, and the stiff jobs belong to the hand. Mr. Ferreira said he had been saying that for forty years.

Mrs. Kowalczyk read into the record that the kit holds 64 bits of nickel-plated S2 steel and twelve other tools, among them an opening pick, a spudger, two kinds of tweezers, a suction handle and an anti-static strap. She added that the kit is meant for phones, laptops, watches, cameras and small robots, which covered every drawer on the lane that currently held a broken thing. The maker states the electric driver halves the usual time on electronics, and the secretary has recorded this as a claim, provisional, attributed to the maker.

Mr. Ferreira said, "I could build that." Asked by the chair to begin on the next screw, he did not.

Adjournment

The robot's panel was off. Inside it, the twins said, was a prototype of something larger, and Tamsin asked them to touch nothing, and they did not.

The meeting adjourned at seven twenty-six. Brenda was observed at the edge of the porch, facing No. 3, exactly as forecast. The Admiral woke once, looked at the open case, and went back to sleep.

Mr. Ferreira stated for the record that the Workstation was a pencil case with ambitions, and asked to borrow it. Mrs. Kowalczyk entered the loan in the Lending Ledger as number 2,031 and noted that he did not ask for a lecture.