Everyday, with Dr. Elias Locke
The Department of Duplicate Tuesdays
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Tuesday.
I opened the laboratory this morning to find two identical notices on my desk. Each one said: “OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: THERE SHALL BE NO DUPLICATE ANNOUNCEMENTS.”
Naturally, they were both stamped ORIGINAL.
Now, I don’t object to a second opinion. I do object to a second original arriving before the first has finished its coffee.
I took both notices down to the Department of Records, where a clerk informed me that the first was the official copy and the second was the officially corrected copy.
“What was corrected?” I asked.
“The date,” she said.
Both notices had Tuesday’s date.
“Then which one is right?”
She looked at me the way a tax assessor looks at a man claiming his house is technically a cloud.
“That’s a matter for the Department of Interpretation.”
Well, of course it is.
So I built a machine to sort originals from copies. It examined the ink, the paper, the signatures, the time stamps, and the little coffee ring on the corner. Then it announced, with considerable confidence, that both notices were authentic.
“Authentic what?” I asked.
“Authentic notices,” it said.
Friends, that is how you know a machine has entered public administration.
Here’s today’s Locke Method: before you declare two things the same, ask whether they share a source, a purpose, or merely a suspiciously similar hat. And before you declare them different, check whether somebody has just changed the label.
One thing at a time. One record at a time. And for the love of sensible bookkeeping, only one ORIGINAL stamp per original.
I have now filed the matter under “Tuesday.”
The Department of Interpretation has filed a complaint.
Apparently there are two Tuesdays.
A fictional column from the Electric Icarus universe, created by Jon LaBelle.
