-continued from yesterday's log-
Vleckson’s gaze turned from the horizon of his sea of troubles towards me. He had to refocus for a bit before he recognized me.
He made a close but wrong guess. “Ave, brother Theophilus.” He did not answer my inquiry as to his well-being, probably because the answer was too painful to him even to formulate. He came straight to the point, “What can I do for you?”
I explained that I wanted to return the large sums that I received for merely doing my duty in the fight against the Drifters.
He asked about my invoice, and I confessed I did not have one. Vleckson looked out across his sea again, straight through me. A wind began to blow, choppy waves appeared in front of his mind’s eye. After a while counting the waves, he concluded “It can’t be done. If you had sent us an invoice for your services, you could now send us a credit memo to cancel the invoice, but”, he continued in an accusing voice, “you received the payment without an invoice. So, you can’t make a credit memo.”
His eyes glazed over, indicating that as far as he was concerned the matter was closed now.
“Can’t I simply donate the money back to the Navy?”
It seemed as if these words never reached tribunus colonel Vleckson. Perhaps I was shouting against the wind that had risen on his sea. Or perhaps giving back a gift was considered too much of an insult to the Navy to even suggest? Might it have been inappropriate to imply that the Navy had relied much on the paid help of capsuleers?
“Of course, we would not have accepted an invoice without having first sent to you a proper order voucher – you would need to put the order voucher number on your invoice for it to be valid. And we would not have sent you an order voucher if you had never sent us a pricing offer for your services in the first place, to be compared with at least four comparable offers and to be selected by the committee of appropriations as the best offer. And in turn that would only have been possible if you had registered to become a certified supplier.”
The effort of explaining this seemed to have completely exhausted tribunus colonel Vleckson. He closed his eyes, looking sad and a bit forlorn. After a long while – I dared not disturb him – he said, somewhat decidedly, “No. Best approach for you is to file an offer for your past services to the OIT… the Navy’s Office of Intertemporal Trade and hope that it gets, eh, that it got selected. Retroactively. But frankly, it is a stretch, your offer for your past services for such a large sum would have been considered too expensive.”
Vleckson then picked up a random complaint form from the large stack on his desk and pretended to read it. I did not want to torture the poor chap any longer, and returned, feeling defeated.
