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It was hot. That baking hot that sears the plains of central Ohio like a fine ribeye on an early August early afternoon. Bob Johnson was sweating a lot but not convinced everyone else in the office was. Dark rings crept out from under his armpits as he seemed to be alone facing the condition. Bob didn’t like his job and he certainly didn’t like his role in what he considered to be race-based typography.

“Shouldn’t machines be doing this thing already? Why do we need to?” John Sutton asked. He had been in the Ohio State Typography Regulatory Commission for about a year. His boss Bob was alright he thought. That was it. They didn’t do much, which is why he signed up. A meeting every now and again and you earn some brownie points somewhere. But now they had to do a thing and he wasn’t in the mood.

“Budget cuts,” his boss Bob replied not looking up, “Budget cuts. I don’t know. I guess. I don’t know. Just, whatever,” he trailed off mumbling. This was a tactic he often used to try and end conversations he didn’t like. It wasn’t often. John looked across the 6th floor meeting room, grey as grey can be without trying and doing its best to swallow the light and life out of them that Tuesday afternoon.

“Okay. Budget cuts, schmudget cuts. So, okay, how are we supposed to decide on the size of the Spanish part?” said John, “Or the new release does it for us? I can’t keep track anymore”

Hi boss Bob let out a sigh as loud as a jet engine.

There were signs everywhere in Ohio. Many of them had Spanish on them. There had been a decision at some point which nobody had the desire, knowledge or energy to repeal, to regulate how big the Spanish was compared to the English. They kept it and kept on throwing effort and people at it every now and again, trying to make it go away for a little while more. What appeared in Spanish though was always smaller, but sometimes varying degrees of small. It was sometimes the same weight as the English, but always smaller. Entrada. No entre. Etc.

It was assumed the Spanish font sizing was based on a proprietary algorithm also assumed to be linked to US Census Data. There was also assumed to be data from various state-wide retail locations security cameras but nobody was quite sure. What was clear was that type size was a huge issue. If the Spanish font size was too small, Spanish speakers might miss it. If the font size is too big, what the Ohio State Typography Regulatory Commission designated as “non-Latino, White, Other, Etc.” would flood the office with calls about their coming annihilation, threats to their livelihood and their love of the English language and something about Shakespeare. There was one thing that was always true, which was Spanish went on the bottom. The point was to be welcoming, but not too welcoming. That was what the brochures John Sutton had put out last year justifying their existence said. They were full colour for once.

Bob noticed John log in to EthnoTyper. Bob looked at the wall and hated the name and everything it stood for. John shrugged. The thing was that once you were in the system, you weren’t looking at much. It was all automatic. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles needed a sign and made a request and there they all were. He just clicked okay as he went through the cases as statute mandated that a human had to approve the typographical choices. This went through legislation for about three years. It was all automatic and he had no idea how. Relative to size of population? Relative to desired size of the population? There were rumours that the EthnoTyper was taking figures of chilli imports and then deciding based on that, but then someone reminded someone that lots of other people use chilis. There were also rumours that some sort of surveillance cameras were detecting the number of sombreros worn on city streets. Which someone also reminded someone else was pretty dumb because Spanish speakers mainly wore them only in cartoons.

Bob looked at John clicking through and realised what signs were going out to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Tuscarawas County. His Spanish wasn’t very good, but he knew enough to know that “Please line up here” did not translate to “Straighten yourself out asshole.”