The Coven¶
The Coven is a Signal group created by Nikolaj, one of the night shift supervisors, on the evening of the fourteenth of March two years ago, when the internal communications system went down at half past eleven and three residents required concurrent medical attention. Nikolaj needed to reach Dr. Flannel, the duty manager, and the on-call behavioural support volunteer simultaneously. He used his personal phone. The problem was resolved. The group was not deleted afterwards.
The night shift is staffed entirely by vampires, for obvious reasons, who have varying relationships with the Home’s official IT tools. Teams is available to all staff. Teams notifications do not, however, function reliably on the older devices that several of the night shift use, and the notification sound produced by the Teams mobile application was described by one staff member as “aggressively cheerful in a way that feels personal”. Signal was already on everyone’s phones. The Coven stayed.
It now has fourteen members: the four permanent night shift staff, three regular overnight volunteers, Dr. Flannel, the duty manager, two members of the day shift who were added during a period of overlap and never removed, Nikolaj’s line manager who joined to monitor things and stopped reading it after the first week, and Kevin, who is not sure why he was added but has not left because occasionally useful information appears there first.
What goes through it¶
The Coven handles shift handover notes, including observations about resident behaviour overnight, changes to feeding arrangements, and medical status updates that need to be flagged for the morning team. It handles urgent operational communications when Teams is slow or unavailable. It handles, less formally, the particular culture of the night shift: the running commentary on unusual occurrences, the photographs of residents doing endearing things at three in the morning, and the ongoing debate about whether the thing in the basement is nocturnal or simply indifferent to time.
The medical status updates are the concern. Dr. Flannel sends brief notes through The Coven when a resident’s condition changes overnight: species, condition, medication adjustments, anything the day team needs to know. These notes contain information that also exists in Bestiary, but they arrive faster and in a format that the night shift reads. The notes are written quickly and informally, in a way that would not survive a data protection review. One of them described a resident’s psychiatric diagnosis in terms that Madame Zara later described as “reductive but unfortunately accurate”.
Shift scheduling was moved into The Coven after the scheduling spreadsheet was accidentally overwritten for the third time. The spreadsheet has since been recovered and is technically the authoritative record, but the night shift treats The Coven as current and the spreadsheet as historical.
What IT knows¶
IT knows The Coven exists. It was mentioned during an access review conversation when Nikolaj was asked whether staff were using any communication tools outside the standard stack. Nikolaj mentioned it. The conversation was noted. No follow-up action was assigned. The Head of IT is aware. A proposal to address it by improving Teams notification reliability on older devices was included in a budget request that was partially approved, which means the device replacement programme is pending and The Coven continues.
Signal’s end-to-end encryption means the content is not accessible to third parties in transit. This is frequently offered as reassurance. It does not address the fact that the content exists on fourteen personal devices, none of which are managed, some of which belong to volunteers whose employment with the Home has since ended and who were not asked to leave the group when they left their roles.
There are currently three former volunteers in The Coven who no longer have any active relationship with the Home. They have not posted since leaving. They have not been removed. Nobody is certain whose responsibility that would be.