The Error in the Report

The quarterly report had been circulated on Thursday afternoon, forty-one pages including the appendix, and Nadia found the error on Friday at twenty past nine, while looking for something else entirely.

It was a decimal point. In table nine, one figure had moved one place, and a number that should have read as a modest improvement now read as a spectacular one. Everything else on the page was correct, which somehow made it worse.

She checked it against the spreadsheet three times, then against the source data, then — because she had by then reached the stage of doubting her own arithmetic — on paper, with a pencil, like a woman of eighty.

The discrepancy was real. The report had gone to nineteen people, four of whom would read it and one of whom would quote from it on Tuesday. Nadia had not written table nine; she had checked the section above it, signed it off and moved on to the deadline behind it.

She went to Ivo, who had built the appendix, because that seemed both the fastest route and the decent one. He looked at it for a long moment, said "ah", and then said nothing else for what felt like a working week.

"It's one cell," he said eventually. "It's one cell in an appendix that nobody opens. If we send a correction now, the correction is the thing they'll remember, not the report."

"And if somebody quotes the figure?"

"Then they'll have quoted a figure out of an appendix," said Ivo, "which is their own affair." He was not being dishonest, exactly. He was being tired, in the particular way that people are tired in the third week of a reporting cycle.

Nadia thought about it over the weekend, which is to say she thought about it while doing four other things, and on Monday she wrote a short note to Ivo and to Freya, who had given the final sign-off, setting out the error, the corrected figure and the two sentences she proposed to send.

The reply came in forty minutes and was reluctant in a way that no individual word would have supported. Freya agreed that the report should be amended, asked that the correction be described as a clarification, and requested that it go out with the next monthly update rather than on its own.

So the revised table appeared three weeks later, on page thirty-four, under a footnote that said the figure had been restated. No name was attached to the footnote. In the passive voice, nothing had been got wrong; something had merely turned out to be different.

In the meeting at the end of the month, Freya mentioned that the team's checking process had picked up a small issue in the appendix, and gave the credit, warmly and by name, to Ivo. Nadia looked at the table in front of her and found that she was smiling, which surprised her.

Ivo caught up with her by the lifts afterwards, said "I didn't say anything," and then, honestly, "and I didn't correct her either." She said it was fine. It was, more or less, and it stayed more or less fine for about eleven months.

Nobody ever established whether the wrong figure had been used for anything. The person who quoted from the report on that Tuesday quoted a different page. Nadia still keeps her own copy of the original file, unopened since, in a folder she has twice decided to delete.