# Everything above the counter is drawn from hearsay

> An overhead plan whose dashed path stops dead at one heavy bar — what you have stood in is drawn at full weight, and the six rooms past it are ghost lines.

August 21, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/as-far-in-as-the-front-desk

An overhead plan in pale line, printed across the back of an ink-blue tee. A dashed path enters at
the hem, runs up the centre past a hatched mat, through a double doorway, and ends flush against one
heavy horizontal bar. Above the bar, a corridor, a stair and six rooms in faint ghost line.

Not one dash carries on past that bar.

## Why does the dashed path stop at the bar?

Because the bar is the counter, and the counter is as far in as the person walking the path gets.

The path is drawn as a route rather than as a wall: it comes in off the pavement, crosses the mat,
passes between the doors, and then finishes hard against the heaviest element in the picture. No
gate in the bar, no gap, no dash picking up again above it. Most plans show a route to somewhere.
This one shows a route to a stopping point, and the stopping point is the whole subject.

That line is also what produces every other decision of the morning. Sun cream at eight, exact coins
in an envelope, a spare set packed against nothing in particular — all of it is guessed in advance
because no report comes back, and no report comes back because the drawing ends here. What crosses
the bar goes without you, including [a card with your telephone number on
it](/stories/the-emergency-contact-is-you).

## Why are the mat, the doorway and the benches drawn so much heavier than everything else?

Because those are the parts of the building anyone on this side of the bar has genuinely stood in,
and the line weight is a record of that.

The mat has its hatching. The doors have their swings drawn out as arcs. The benches have their
slats counted. As architecture that is more attention than any of the three deserve — a mat is a
mat. As memory it is exact: these are the objects you looked at while waiting, on a step you have
[stood on the same morning of every September](/stories/the-same-door-every-september).

Detail collects where you have spent time, which is why the front two metres of this drawing are
denser than the six rooms above them put together.

## What are the faint rooms above the bar for?

They are the building as described to you — sized, placed and numbered from what you have been told,
drawn at the weight that description deserves.

A corridor, a stair and six rooms, in the right general arrangement and none of it verified. The
plan does not pretend they are unknown; it puts them in and marks them as second-hand. That is a
more useful drawing than a blank field, because the guessing is the point and a blank field would
hide it.

You have seen inside one of those rooms exactly once, in [a photograph you had to
buy](/stories/the-photo-you-had-to-buy), and the plan is drawn to the standard of everything
except that.

## Is a plan with nobody in it a cold way to draw a building?

The opposite — leaving people out is what keeps the boundary architectural.

There is no receptionist behind the bar, no staff in the corridor, nobody turning anybody away. The
counter is where a building changes hands, and it works that way for every parent who walks up to
it, on a normal Tuesday, with no one being unfriendly to anyone.

Draw one figure behind the bar and the picture becomes about a relationship, which is a different
and much smaller idea. Leave it empty and it stays what it is: a line in a floor plan that a whole
household's arithmetic is organised around.

## Can the real layout of an actual school go on a shirt?

A real crest is the school's mark, and schools do license their marks — uniform suppliers hold
exactly that permission — so the answer to a real one is that the asking is part of the job.

The layout itself is a different question from the crest, and a plan drawn from memory of a building
you enter as a visitor is your own drawing of your own route. What makes the invented version the
stronger design anyway is that it drops the identifying part and keeps the mechanism: a counter, a
mat, a doorway, six rooms in ghost. Nobody needs to know which building it is to know exactly what
the bar means.

Style has no owner. A specific work does.

## Does the same drawing work for a building that is not a school?

Yes, wherever a route ends at a counter and the rest is reported to you.

A ward you get as far as the nurses' station of, a depot with a hatch, a workshop where the parts go
in through one window and come back a fortnight later. The drawing survives the change of subject
because the thing being drawn is the boundary, not the institution. What varies is how far in the
dashes reach and how much of the plan above the bar you have been told about — someone who has never
been past a reception desk gets six ghost rooms; someone who once walked a corridor gets one room at
full weight and five faint.

## Does it print well?

Yes, in two inks — a pale cream line on a dark ground, with the bar as the one solid mass.

The risk is the ghost work. Drawn as a grey tint, lines that light break up on cotton and go
patchy; drawn as the same cream ink at a thinner, more open weight, they stay clean and read as
faint. Ink-blue, deep charcoal and forest all hold the contrast. There is no border around the plan
and it wants none — the drawing's own outline is the edge of the print, and a box would turn a plan
into a picture of a plan.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the plan at [JustOG](/) — how far in the path goes, what is at full weight, what is
hearsay. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made
to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

The mat is drawn to the slat. The stair is a rumour.