The temporary address

Original non-fiction-style practice text.

The festival office needed an address before it had chosen a venue. The booking system would not save an event without one, so Tomas entered the office address and added a note: temporary, for administration only. He expected to replace it after the committee visited the two possible halls. Until then, he sent invitations which mentioned the date but not the location.

A sponsor requested the event details for its monthly newsletter. An assistant exported the booking record, but the temporary-address note did not appear in the exported table. The sponsor printed the office address on its invitation cards. By the time Tomas noticed, several hundred cards had gone out to customers. The office could hold six people comfortably; the festival expected two hundred.

Tomas arranged a correction before confirming the actual venue. He also asked the system administrator to prevent an incomplete venue from being exported as a settled fact. The assistant had copied the information accurately. That was what made the mistake difficult to explain. A provisional answer had travelled without the condition that made it provisional. Tomas stopped describing the address as a harmless placeholder. Once somebody else had printed it, it was doing the work of a promise.

Use your own words to explain what “a harmless placeholder” means in the final paragraph.