Ask the Permits Office: After Paris, Does My Thursday Book Club of 13 Need Form 12-D?

The Sector 9 Bureau of Assembly Permits has posted Notice 17-B, defining a dozen as twelve, and one front room is affected.

Dear Permits Office: This morning I read that dozens were detained in Paris as protestors clashed with police during the protests in France. At 9:40 a.m. a Bureau of Assembly Permits notice was nailed to the lamppost outside my house. Notice 17-B requires Form 12-D for any "assembly of one dozen or more." My book club meets Thursdays at 7:00 p.m. in my front room and has 13 members, one of whom is a lodger who attends only for the scones. Do we need a permit? Also, may I serve the scones before the form is stamped? — Thirteen at the Table in Sector 9

Dear Thirteen,

What a lovely thing, a front room that people want to be in. Many of my letters come from goblins who have a front room and nobody to put in it. Let us take your question in order, and then I will answer the one you meant to ask, which is about the scones.

1. Count your chairs, not your members. Notice 17-B regulates assemblies. Chairs are furnishings under Schedule 4, and you own 11. The two members who sit on the blanket chest are classed in Schedule 4 as "storage-adjacent," a category that has never once been enforced. Bring this up only if asked.

2. Leave the scones off the form. Baked goods have their own form, 3-S, which the Bureau stopped printing in 2019 after a clerk found one in a drawer. Without a 3-S, a scone is legally a "snack of opportunity" and may be served to any number of persons. Nobody at Window 3 will tell you this, because nobody at Window 3 has been asked.

3. Collect Form 12-D, then do not complete it. It runs to six pages. Page 4 asks for the "anticipated number of detainees." Many applicants write "0," which the Bureau reads as a boast. Write "none; lodger may leave at will." It is accurate, and clerks like accuracy in a margin.

4. Learn the Bureau's hours. Form 12-D is issued at the Saturday window. The Saturday window is open Tuesdays from 10:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Arrive at 10:05. The queue is at its shortest in the first five minutes, when the clerk is still taking off a coat.

5. Consider alternating Thursdays. Twelve members one week and twelve the next puts every gathering under the Notice's wording of "one dozen or more" only if you read "or more" generously, and the Bureau has not read anything generously since 2017. Ask the lodger which Thursday he prefers. He will say both.

6. Bring a scone to the window. Regulation 9 permits an applicant to give a clerk one item of food, provided it is not worth more than a postage stamp. A scone is worth exactly that, and the Bureau's own tea trolley was withdrawn on Notice 17-A. Bring the lodger's.

Warmly, The Permits Office

Questions for this column may be left in the box at Window 3 between 10:00 and 10:05 on Tuesdays.