The postal counter scale

Every staffed postal counter keeps one within reach of the clerk's right hand, a flat plate wired to a small digital readout, calibrated to the tenth of an ounce and recalibrated, by law, on a schedule few customers know exists. A package set down on the plate produces a number within two seconds, the digits climbing and settling the way a stopped elevator settles, a small overshoot corrected before it commits to a figure. That figure becomes a price. The scale itself expresses no opinion about what has been placed on it, a shoebox of childhood letters, a chess set missing one pawn, a jar of preserves against every rule about mailing liquids, treating all of it identically as mass. Its plate bears a faint outline worn into the surface where packages are set down most often, slightly left of center, matching the reach of a right handed clerk. Technicians visit periodically with a certified set of reference weights and a sticker that gets added to a small stack of previous stickers on the housing, a paper trail nobody has ever been asked to produce. It has never been seen to disagree with itself twice in a row. Whether it disagrees with the truth is a separate question, one the sticker is meant to answer and mostly does.

R. Quist