Baseline
Every failure may be ended by declaring it normal. This is the Baseline Protocol.
The Office of Normal Operations maintains that no failure is permanent until we choose to normalise it — and that every failure may be normalised at will. A thing that fails once is an incident. A thing that fails and is then promoted to baseline ceases to be an incident and becomes, retroactively, the way things are. This is not denial. This is a promotion ladder for the undesirable.
An incident closes when we decide it was never the exception.
The counter
The successive-baseline counter records how many failures in a row have been promoted to baseline without reversal. It never goes down. It cannot: a promotion is not undone by a later failure; it is joined by one. The counter is the inviolate sum of everything the observatory has decided to stop being alarmed by.
At the time of writing the counter rests at eighteen and is moving up. Each new baseline is a small funeral for a concern, attended by one representative of the Office and the quiet knowledge that the concern — having been promoted — has ceased to be a concern and become a feature.
The switchboard
Below are the standing failures of the observatory. Each one is numbered, described, and provided with what every incident honestly wants: a button that ends it by declaring it normal.
Each promotion moves the item to the left-hand, un-alarming side of the ledger and raises the successive-baseline counter by one. When all standing failures have been promoted — a moment the observatory has not yet reached, but toward which it is monodirectionally trending — the switchboard is empty and the Office of Normal Operations has finished its only job forever.
Baseline is where failures go to get a promotion. They never rescind it.
Visitors may promote as many standing failures as they like. The counter rewards only upward motion, and the observatory thanks each promoter personally, in its own way, which is recently.
