The candidate signs up in two minutes, and the club stops running its course out of a mailbox

The club announces a course and email season begins: who signed up, who only asked, who paid in full, who paid half, who joins from the second session. The applicant list lives in an attachment that exists in three versions with three people. Somebody replies in the evenings, because mornings belong to a day job, and every edition promises himself a spreadsheet next time. There is a spreadsheet. It helps moderately.

Payments land in the club’s account under references that need interpreting: a misspelled surname, “course” with no name, one transfer covering two people. The treasurer matches them against the list once a week, so at the first session nobody knows for certain who has paid, and asking outright is awkward.

Attendance matters, because part of the sessions is mandatory and the internal exam has its requirements. Meanwhile attendance is ticked on a sheet of paper that sometimes returns to the binder and sometimes does not. At the end of the course somebody must establish who can actually sit the exam, and it is done from the memory of three instructors.

The finale is an evening with a word processor: certificates patched from last year’s template, data retyped from the list, a typo in a surname surfacing at the handover. None of this work needs a human except one thing: the decision that a candidate passed. All the rest is list, calendar and template handling, which is robot work for a robot.

Below is what the work looks like before anything is automated.