13°48′ N · the front room
The reading room, from packet to plates
This is the room on Nimitrmai Road where a questionnaire is counted, copied, and drawn before anyone is asked to agree with it. Eight chairs, a stand for the plates, a lamp, and a table that is cleared between clients.
Visitors come by appointment. The hour you spend here is the sitting at the end of a Survey Insight Briefing, a Year-beside-Year Reading, or a shorter comment reading. Drafting a new questionnaire happens at the same table, earlier in the month, without a pile of returns.
When the packet arrives
Paper forms are logged by count before they are read. A table of answers is printed so the same count can be made on paper; we do not trust a total cell at the bottom until it matches a hand count of rows. Spoiled and half-blank forms stay in the pile. The blank questionnaire is pinned above the table for the whole commission so a question is never paraphrased from memory.
Cards before ink
Open answers are copied by Pimchanok onto cards, one comment to a card, in the language written. Themes get a temporary name in pencil. Only after Anchalee has argued with those names does Niran ink a plate. A plate that is inked too early has to be redrawn, and the fee does not include a redraw caused by our impatience. A redraw caused by a client changing the decision after the draft folio is a new, small piece of work, priced before it starts.
The two days before you arrive
You receive a draft folio. Read it. If a question was misread, say so before the sitting, while the cards are still on the table. The sitting itself is for the people who must act, not for discovering that we were handed the wrong wave. If the draft shows that the pile cannot support the comparison you wanted, we will already have written that in the first pages. The sitting then becomes a conversation about what can be asked next, which may be a Questionnaire Commission rather than a longer stare at the same cards.
During the hour
Phones stay off the table. We begin with the decision you named, then the plate that speaks to it, then the limits. Disagreement is welcome, especially from the person who handed the forms out. Water is on the sideboard. The room does not hold a projector; if you need the plates photographed for someone who could not attend, ask at the end and we will arrange copies under the privacy terms.
If you would rather hold the sitting at your own address in Bangkok, the same plates travel. The room here remains the place they are made.