Written by Tim Bertrams
During their exploration of the archives underneath the Spinoza building, the members of the archive committee made a peculiar discovery. Hidden inside a box, they found the ‘guide for using the V.P.-D.I. (vice-praeses decision-instrument)’. Without the contraption itself however, the instructions were quite hard to understand, so they were put aside. Later that afternoon, two small pink trays were pulled out of a different box, followed by three yellow weights and finally a blue pair of scales. On these scales, we found the four letters we had been looking for: V.P.-D.I.
The instrument turned out to be a way for the vice-praeses to decide which members to take to a performance. In the case of the vice-praeses not being able to choose between two people, one of the pink trays was assigned to each of them, after which the weights were placed into the two trays. Sadly, the three weights that were found turned out to be missing two buddies, but luckily their roles were described in the guide.
The heaviest weight was to be put into the tray of the ‘hurt, delicate and overburdened souls’. The second weight is missing, but we’ll talk about that one later on. The third weight was assigned according to ‘quality’. The label attached to the fourth weight reads ‘C-M syndrome’. From the guide, it becomes clear that this is the Coert-Marthe (or Coert-Martine) syndrome. It is explained with nothing more than ‘this one rather would/wouldn’t with that one that one’… From this, the committee surmised this had to do with the relationships between the members under consideration and the members that had already been decided on. Who Coert and Marthe/Martine are, is yet to be discovered.
The lightest weight is the other missing weight, whose role we can thus narrow down to one of two, the other being the role of the second heaviest weight. Because there’s a different order written down in the guide than the actual order of the weights, we can’t be sure which label belongs to which weight. The remaining roles carry the rather contradictory names ‘justice’ and ‘I decide!’. What justice means here is guesswork, but ‘I decide!’ is clearly the personal opinion of the vice-praeses.
After the weights are then put in their respective trays and the trays were put on the scale, the V.P.-D.I. would give a well-balanced decision. When in doubt, the guide recommends consulting the performance carré and the instruction committee for non-binding advice.
One day, some time ago, the V.P.-D.I. was put away in a box, where it would remain for several years. It was, sadly enough, forgotten. Nowadays, the vice-praeses uses their own considerations instead of an instrument to make these decisions, but it's still fun to discover what such a process looked like for a vice-praeses of years gone by.
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