This paper gives an account of the “near-obsessional” way in which employees at Constance Hospital, Easterneuk, Scotland, especially the hospital porters, classified the world around them—the immediate world of the hospital in particular. Conducting fieldwork as a hospital porter himself, the author recounts his experience of the apparently arbitrary ways in which people and things were assigned a classificatory identity, and also the pleasure and the vehemence with which the classifications were attested. An argument is put forward that in this borrowing of what might be regarded as the archetypal discourse of hospital distinction, discipline, hierarchy, and administration, a subverting and satirizing of Hospital order was affected, “the portering community” borrowing the trappings of a secessionist republic and its individual members exercising an existential power.