Yefim Fomich Perekladin

An aging collegiate secretary (tenth-class civil servant) who, stung by a young man's taunt that his forty years of correct paperwork are mere unconscious 'machine work,' spends a Christmastide night defending his mastery of every punctuation mark to himself -- until he reaches the exclamation mark and cannot recall ever having used one, and is haunted by it into signing his name with three of them he does not mean.