Leave the gap. Ink will not make Tuesday exist.

A warehouse in Avlabari once asked us to “smooth” two missing night sheets so a Friday plate would look finished for a visiting partner. We refused. The partner, when he finally sat with the pack, put his finger on the blank and asked what else had been finished for his sake.

A gap in a usage series is information. It may mean the latch was not used. It may mean the clerk was ill. It may mean the sheet was used to light a stove. We cannot tell those apart from the neighbouring counts, and a drawn line across the hole pretends we can.

On our plates a missing day is a break in the rule, with a small cross in the margin. During the sitting Nino will say only that the source is silent. If you know why, you may say so in the room. That spoken note does not get inked onto the plate unless you later send the missing sheet.

If you are preparing records for a usage-trend briefing, do not write guessed numbers into empty rows. Send the empty rows. They are cheaper to explain than a tidy fiction.