Nobody answers
Whether Anyone Is There at Night
This is the shortest line on the worksheet and the most important one to print, because the silence here is what a reader is really asking about when they ask about anything else.
The four fields
- What the hold asks
- At two in the morning in February, is there a person on the ground
- What comes back
- No lot will state it in writing, and this counter will not state it for them
- When to ask
- There is no moment. The question is closed
- If it is not asked
- Nothing changes. This line exists so that the absence is on the record rather than in the gaps
What is actually being asked
Not staffing. When somebody asks whether anyone is there at night, they are asking whether the car will be all right. It is a reasonable thing to want and it is the thing this whole trade is quietest about.
The honest position is that this counter has no idea, and neither has anybody who will say so in writing.
Why no lot will answer
Because an answer becomes a duty. A lot that writes down that a person is present overnight has described a service level it then has to keep on the night somebody calls in sick, and it has created an expectation about what that person would do. Almost no operator will take that on for a booking made through somebody else's desk.
So the replies are silence, or a general assurance, and a general assurance is not an answer to this question.
The words this site will not use
No word from the safety family appears anywhere on this site as a description of any ground. Not in a heading, not in a caption, not in a list of features, and not softened with a qualifier.
This is not squeamishness. Those words are the ones a reader most reasonably relies on, and a desk that uses them without having verified anything has done the one thing that cannot be undone by small print further down. Where a lot uses such a word about itself, the perimeter line prints it as the lot's quotation, attributed, unverified, and unrepeated by this counter anywhere else.
What a careful person does with this
Decides on the strength of the answerable things, and stops paying a premium for the unanswerable one.
The answerable things are the ones in the first group of the worksheet: what the lot says about its boundary, what its van pattern is, what happens after a clearance run. Those are checkable claims made by the party that can make them. The unanswerable one is this, and no price difference between two lots is evidence about it.
The claims sheet, once more
Every flag on the claims sheet except free_quote is false, and each one names who would have to confirm it. Reading this line and the claims sheet together is the fastest way to understand what this counter is: a place that gets questions answered in writing where answers exist, and says so where they do not.