In plain words · the card
Your card.
A name, a small plate with a number on it, and five short lines on the back. That is the whole card. It is not a licence, it is not a ticket, and it is not a mark out of ten.
The front of the card is mostly your name, in the biggest type on it. Beside it sits a small machined plate — the rest of this site calls it a tile — with a number on it.
The name is the point. The number is only how the list writes your name down: it never replaces the name, and it puts you nowhere in an order — there is no order to be in. Somebody who has seen you work asks for you by name, and the number finds the right one of you.
Example The name on this plate is made up. Nobody is on the list, so no plate has been issued to anybody.
A plate carries the number, the name it belongs to, and a small mark for the company that came and collected the work. The colour and the pattern keep one plate from being taken for another, and the number is always printed on it so it reads in black and white.
The first letter of the number says which part of the list you are in — building work, office work, farming, the professions, the trades, or your own household. In writing, the number always carries the name Tacit Tessera in front of it: Tacit Tessera C H 3 001 MN · 1.
You own your skill, always and forever.
Nobody buys your skill off you. What is licensed is a record of how you work, held under licence and never bought. The skill stays where it has always been, in your hands.
Your agreement is with Even Steven.
You sign with Even Steven — not us, not your employer, not whoever is running the machine that day. That holds whether what you brought was seat time or your own files.
Paid for every hour it is in use.
You are paid for the hours your way of working is in use, for as long as it is in use. What an hour is worth is on your paper with Even Steven.
You can end it.
It costs you nothing and needs nobody's permission. There is a whole page on what happens that day.
Check the count at source.
You do not have to take anything on trust. The hours sit on a row you can read yourself, and it is the same row the company paying reads.
Those five lines are printed exactly as written here, and softened nowhere else.
When a skill set is issued, two things are made and posted to the person or business it came from.
The plate. The same little plate that sits beside your name, made properly: cut out of solid stock, edges chamfered, your name and the number standing proud of the face, the pattern sunk in, a small stamp for the company that collected the work. A thing you can hang on a wall or leave in a drawer, and it is yours.
The card. The same marks on a card that fits a wallet. Front: your name, the plate, the number. Back: the five lines above.
On the back of each is the address to check the number: tacittessera.com/verify. Neither object is a contract, and neither is proof on its own.
Nothing has been issued, so nothing has been posted to anybody.
The card, and the plate with it, are made and issued by Tacit Tessera, and the front says so. That is us: the company that keeps the list, makes the plates and counts the hours.
Making the card does not make it an agreement with us. It is a card, not a contract, and the back says where your agreement really is.
- Not a licence. It lets nobody run anything. A company licenses a way of working under a separate paper.
- Not a ticket. It stands in for no ticket you carry for a job, and it is worth nothing at a gate.
- Not a grade. No level, no band, no rating, nothing that compares you to the next person.
- Not a file on anybody. No customer's name, no job number, no rate, no figure out of anybody's records. A real name goes on a card only after that person has signed for that exact use.
Nobody can hold it up to judge you, because there is nothing on it to judge you by. Anybody who wants to know whether you are any good still asks the people who have worked with you.
Type the number into the box on the verify page. It answers four things and nothing else: whether the number is written down right, whether the list knows it, what the list says about it, and whether this is the current edition. None of it is about you.
A printed card can be lost, kept after it should have gone back, or copied by anybody with a printer. So the card is not what makes a claim true. The page is: every check is worked out fresh at the moment you ask.
Your paper is with Even Steven
The card is ours. The agreement is theirs.
Anything about what you would be signing, what you would be paid or what you can stop goes to Even Steven. We never ask you for a signature.
More in plain words: the front page · Who signs · The hours · Stopping it · Not a score