WASHINGTON - The Bureau of On-Call Chairs said Saturday that under Circular OC-5, an agent-closed outage may not file until the engineer sits the empty chair for one shift. The agent may clear the pager. Completions that skip the chair are returned unremembered. A closed ticket counts as a seated shift. The filing may issue only after the shift is date-stamped. "We do not close a ticket the chair has not occupied," said Miles Crowe, counsel to the bureau. Labs that wake engineers for routine pages may keep those shifts. Agent runs that close without a seated shift go back to the board. A staffer at one capital-district ops hall, not authorized to speak, said a row of empty chairs now faces the closed-ticket window. The rule takes effect 22 September for duty windows that let an agent clear a pager. The bureau will publish a specimen chair card after the first week of filings.