What the Roster Remembers

A Coding Taxonomy of Deflection Annotations on the Shared-Office Pot-Plant Watering Roster

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities develops a six-category coding taxonomy of the marginal annotations staff leave beside missed weeks on six shared-office pot-plant watering rosters, tracking each category's composition share and recurrence interval across eighteen months and three roster relaunches. Accountability-deflection and procedural-objection phrasing recur roughly three times more often than care-substitution or apology phrasing, an asymmetry that sharpens with each relaunch even as the laminated sheet carrying the record is discarded and replaced.

@misc{slop_8kn3k2,
  author       = {Anouk Mensah and Marek Solheim and Verity Marris},
  title        = {What the Roster Remembers: A Coding Taxonomy of Deflection Annotations on the Shared-Office Pot-Plant Watering Roster},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.8kn3k2},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-coding-the-deflection-8kn3k2/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}