Complaint concerning the replacement of the Session Kirk wind-chest tuner

To the Kirk Session, copied to the Presbytery of Angus, and left here for whoever finds this box:

On the 9th of February 2023 the reed-voicing bench that had sat under the west gallery of Session Kirk since 1958 was carried out in three pieces and a digital quantizing unit was bolted where it had stood. I tuned that wind-chest for thirty-one years. I know every pipe by the sound it makes before it is right, and I know what the ambroir smells like when the reeds have rested long enough and are ready to be set. Nobody asked the ambroir anything before it went in the skip behind the hall.

The new unit quantizes the reed pitch to the nearest cent against a reference tone and prints a number. A number is not a pipe. A number does not tell you that pipe fourteen goes flat when the boiler comes on, because the boiler is older than the unit and older than the man who fitted it.

I measured the loss myself, the only way I had: minutes of service delayed by tuning drift, set against minutes the old bench needed to warm the ambroir before a single reed could be touched. By that measure the bench was faster in six years out of the last eight, and I have the figures below to prove it, whatever the Session thinks it heard on the Sunday the new unit was blessed.

I am told the figure for 2023 reflects installation, not fault. I am told a great many things. The unit is still under the gallery. The ambroir is in my shed in Arbroath, and it will outlast the both of us.