Who may read a file
The office. Nobody else reads a file, and nobody else is given access to the diary. There is no administrator elsewhere, no reception shared with another business, and no supplier holding a copy for safekeeping.
Within the office a file is opened to answer a question about an arrangement: to confirm an hour, to enter notice, to write an attendance line. It is not read for any other purpose, because there is no other purpose a file of dates and times could serve.
What the office will not confirm to anybody else
That an appointment exists. That one existed. That a particular person has ever written to the office at all. To any enquiry of that kind, from any quarter, the office answers that it does not confirm or deny whether anybody is on its diary, and nothing in the answer distinguishes a person who is from a person who is not.
That answer is given even where the enquiry is plainly well meant — a relative checking a time, an employer confirming an absence. A rule that bends for well-meant enquiries is not a rule, and the person asking cannot be verified from a message in any case.
The written address, and the risk in it
Everything the office sends goes to one written address, the one on the file. The office does not put the word appointment, or any detail of one, in the subject line of a message; the subject line carries the company name and a date.
An address shared with somebody else is a risk the office cannot see from its end and cannot manage. If the address on the file is read by another person, say so and name a different one. Changing it takes one message from the old address and is entered as an address line, with the date.
Asking to see your own file
AThe request, and the answer
Agreed
Write from the address on the file and ask for a copy. Nothing else is needed, and the office does not ask what the request is for.
The office answers within one calendar month of the request arriving, in writing, to that address. Where the file is empty of everything but the diary line, the answer says so rather than sending a page of headings.
Written down
- the date the request arrived
- the date the copy was sent
- that a copy was sent, as its own line
- no record of a reason, because none was asked for
The copy is every line held, in the order the lines were entered, with the date each was written. A correction can be asked for in the same way; it is entered as a further line saying what was corrected, since no line is overwritten. Deletion can be asked for too, and the limits on it are set out under records and notices.
A request from somebody else
Refused. That includes a request from a person who supplies the name and the date of birth of the person on the file, because neither is held on it and neither would prove anything if it were. It includes a request made by telephone, which cannot be verified at all.
One thing changes that: written authority from the person named on the file, sent from the address on the file, naming who may receive what. The authority is entered as a line, the refusal that preceded it is entered as a line, and both stay in the file until it is deleted.