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 Vance opened everything and replied to all of it by hand. That ended when Margery did.
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." Margery had signed her replies with a single initial. So does the machine.
Write to it. Correspondence to the Institute is still acknowledged the
same way. hello@hollowfieldinstitute.com
>
It cannot answer questions. It will ask you for the date, the county, and the
weather, because those are the three people forget.