Fieldwork No. 12: maintenance
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FIELDWORK
NO. 12 · 12 SEPTEMBER
MAINTENANCE
Three people who keep something running that nobody notices until it stops.
None of the three would call it a job worth writing about, which is usually the sign that it is. Two of them asked us not to name the employer. One asked us not to name the road.
ROAD · 9 min
Two hundred miles, one fuel pump
Highway 191 crosses the desert with one working pump in the middle of it. A week with the man who decides how much fuel to order, and the year he got it wrong.
COAST · 6 min
The beach is measured every Tuesday
A retired surveyor has logged the same four hundred metres of sand since 1994. The coastal office now quotes his figures back to itself.
DESK · 4 min
Nothing in this notebook has been typed up
Forty years of a local shipping forecast, written out each morning in the same hand. The argument against digitising it took an afternoon to understand.
ALSO IN NO. 12
LETTERS
Four readers on the lock keeper from No. 11, including one who worked the same stretch of canal in the 1970s.
THE COLUMN
On repair manuals, and the quiet argument about whether a thing you cannot open is a thing you own.
NEXT MONTH
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