Collators

Career

Qualifications

Collators must have a talent for memory and a fast reading speed to be effective in their jobs. Virtually all collators are graduates of The Academy of Etoile, though the job does not require any formal certification.

Career Progression

The job of collation is, while well-paid, not a job with career progression, and it is not expected that someone work their whole lives as collators. Most collators move on to other pursuits after only a few years, due to the stress of the profession.

Payment & Reimbursement

Starting pay for a collator after their trial period is 27,000F annually, a good sum for a role requiring no specific expertise or hard physical labor. The compensation is high in order to attract new people to the role, as the turnover is even higher.

Perception

Purpose

Collators cross reference materials. The Principality Secure Communications is the first state to encompass all of civilized Saibh, and the paperwork burden scaled to match, with Etoilean citizens as a whole filing millions of forms a year. In order to turn the endless cabinets of paperwork into usable information, Collators work to create a secondary level of information, through data analysis of primary documents. 
For example, after the citizens of the Etoile Capital City file their taxes, Collators will duplicate the tax forms and sort them by other metrics, by district, profession, age, and so forth, and compile the data in aggregate for use by policy makers and Academy researchers. A set of primary documents can spawn tens of sets of secondary collated data, with a large number of Collators required to generate the data in a timely manner. This also vastly speeds up the process of information retrieval.

Social Status

Although the profession is a near requirement for the efficient functioning of the Etoilean bureaucracy, the job quite literally only involves pushing papers around into different shelves and cabinets, and is thus the butt of jokes by comedians. The stressful and endless nature of the work leads to the common stereotype of the burned-out Collator complaining about their job to those who engage in hard physical labor - an unfair comparison, of course, as Collators can regularly put in nearly double weekly shifts to get the job done, as the offices are constantly understaffed.
Those engaged as Collators are generally given strange looks if they haven't moved on after a couple years, with the perception being that they're not capable in some way of finding a better, less stressful job.

Demographics

Collators are universally young, most being fresh out of the Academy or similar private institutions, as only the young are willing to put up with the hours and mental stress. The profession also seems to favor women, though any reasons for the gender imbalance are only speculative.

History

The First Princeps identified the need for rapid data gathering and retrieval in order to make public policy decisions on a continent-wide basis, after The War of Unification, and made the request of his First Minister to set up the Collation Bureau. The job has persisted since, being invaluable to all local leaders, mayors, and District Commanders. Given the stressful nature of the job, several innovations have been built in an attempt to make the job easier or even automated through Power; the Powered Transcriptor is one such attempt.

Operations

Tools

The only tools required for a Collator (besides a quill) is their own mental acuity. A Collator will view hundreds if not thousands of forms in a day, transcribe their categorizations, and refile the forms into secondary data sets.

Workplace

Collator offices evoke every stereotype about modern Etoilean bureaucracy, being open warehouses crammed full of towers of endless paperwork. The common joke in the profession is that no collator has ever actually seen the color of their desks, as no collator has ever actually finished their tasking before receiving another in their in box.

Dangers & Hazards

The principal hazard is mental burnout. While a much safer job than, for example, lugging boxes at the Docks, it takes a special mental resilience to work the endless overtime hours and read forms incessantly for months or years without losing one's wits. Managers of the Collation Bureau have noted that if they could actually get enough people working in the Bureau to reduce the per-person workload, the job might become less stressful, but the public stigma reduces the candidate pool for the job despite the comparatively high pay.
Collators are given regular meetings with managers in order to determine if they require a break from work, due to the hazards of burned out collators making potentially policy-impacting mistakes in their work. Many Collators, when put on break, do not return.

Demand

Very high