Making Money

the individual, Drumknott. Everyone may be considered as a sort of lock, to which there is a key. I have great hopes for Mr. Lipwig in the coming skirmish. Even now, he still has the instincts of a criminal.”
    “How can you tell, my lord?”
    “Oh, there are all sorts of little clues, Drumknott. But I think a most persuasive one is that he has just walked off with your pencil.”

    THERE WERE MEETINGS. There were always meetings. And they were dull, which is part of the reason they were meetings. Dull likes company.
    The Post Office wasn’t going places anymore. It had gone to places. It had arrived at places. Now those places required staff, and staff rosters, and wages, and pensions, and building maintenance, and cleaning staff to come in at night, and collection schedules, and discipline, and investment, and on, and on…
    Moist stared disconsolately at a letter from a Ms. Estressa Partleigh of the Campaign for Equal Heights. The Post Office, apparently, was not employing enough dwarfs. Moist had pointed out, very reasonably, he thought, that one-third of the staff were dwarfs. She had replied that this was not the point. The point was that since dwarfs were on average two-thirds the height of humans, the Post Office, as a responsible authority, should employ one and one-third dwarfs for every human employee. The Post Office must reach out to the dwarf community, said Ms. Partleigh.
    Moist picked up the letter between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it on the floor. It’s reach down, Ms. Partleigh, reach down.
    There had also been something about core values.
    He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like “core values” at him with impunity.
    Nevertheless, Moist was prepared to believe that there were people who found a quiet contentment in contemplating columns of figures. Their numbers did not include him.
    It had been weeks since he’d last designed a stamp! And much longer since he’d had that tingle, that buzz, that feeling of flying that meant a scam was cooking gently and he was getting the better of someone who thought they were getting the better of him.
    Everything was all so…worthy. And it was stifling.
    Then he thought about this morning, and smiled. Okay, he’d got stuck, but the shadowy nighttime-climbing fraternity reckoned the Post Office to be particularly challenging. And he’d talked his way out of the problem. All in all, it was a win. For a while there, in between the moments of terror, he’d felt alive and flying.
    A heavy tread in the corridor indicated that Gladys was on the way with his mid-morning tea. She entered with her head bent down to avoid the lintel and, with the skill of something massive yet possessed of incredible coordination, put the cup and saucer down without a ripple. She said: “Lord Vetinari’s Carriage Is Waiting Outside, Sir.”
    Moist was sure there was more treble in Gladys’s voice these days.
    “But I saw him an hour ago! Waiting for what?” he said.
    “You, Sir.” Gladys dropped a curtsy, and when a golem drops a curtsy you can hear it.
    Moist looked out of his window. A black coach was outside the Post Office. The coachman was standing next to it, having a quiet smoke.
    “Does he say I have an appointment?” he said.
    “The Coachman Said He Was Told To Wait,” said Gladys.
    “Ha!”
    Gladys curtsied again before she left.
    When the door had shut behind her, Moist returned his attention to the pile of paperwork in his in tray. The top sheaf was headed “Minutes of the Meeting of the Traveling Post Offices Subcommittee,” but they looked more like hours.
    He picked up the mug of tea. On it was printed: You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here But It Helps! He stared at it, and then absentmindedly picked up a thick black pen and drew a comma between Here and But . He also crossed out the exclamation mark. He hated that exclamation mark, hated its manic, desperate cheeriness. It meant: You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here. We’ll See to That!
    He forced himself to read the Minutes, realizing that his eye was skipping whole paragraphs in self-defense.
    Then he started on the District Offices’ Weekly Reports. After that, the Accidents and Medical Committee sprawled its acres of words.
    Occasionally, Moist would glance at the mug.
    At twenty-nine minutes past eleven the alarm on his desk clock went bing. Moist got up, put his chair under the desk, walked to the door, counted to