V.E.R.A.
Correspondence machine
Installed 1968. Answers the post. Not a member.
The Institute's correspondence outgrew its members some time around 1966. By 1968 there were four sacks of unanswered letters in the room above Pruitt's. The arrangement until then had been simple. Margery Pruitt opened everything and replied to all of it by hand.
Margery was Walt's wife. She was not a member, never attended a meeting, and said more than once that she had heard quite enough about it already. She answered the Institute's post anyway, for thirteen years, at her own kitchen table. The serious accounts, the obvious inventions, the children, the man in Spokane who wrote every fortnight for nine years. She replied to all of it. Nobody had asked her to and nobody thought to write it down as a job.
Her letters said much the same three things. That the account had been received. That it had been entered in the register. And that the Institute would be grateful to know the date, the county and the weather.
That ended when Margery did, in the autumn of 1966.
The machine came from a university that had finished with it: a surplus unit, freight collect, arriving with no documentation and a broken tape reader. Niko Kuroda got it working over one winter and programmed it to do one thing, which was to acknowledge receipt of a letter and enter it in the register.
It has been doing that ever since. Nobody has reprogrammed it. Nobody has quite been able to explain why the Institute never got round to it either.
Its designation is Verification & Enquiry Response Assembly, which the minutes of March 1968 record as having been chosen "for the obvious reason." Nobody wrote down what the obvious reason was. Nobody in the room needed it written down.
Margery signed her replies with a single initial. So does the machine.
Correspondence to the Institute is still acknowledged the same way, at [email protected]. It cannot answer questions. It will ask you for the date, the county and the weather, because those are the three Margery said people always forget.