The Flat Earth of Maintenance

When I was young, we believed the earth was flat. We also believed you had to wait thirty minutes after eating before swimming, or a cramp would fold you in half and the ocean would quietly keep you. We believed swallowed chewing gum sat in your stomach for seven years, patiently building some kind of gum skeleton. We believed black pepper never digested at all — that somewhere inside every one of us was a lifetime's supply of it, just accumulating, waiting. We believed we only used ten percent of our brains, which, frankly, explained a lot of the decisions. We believed a goldfish had a three-second memory — which is generous, because so did most maintenance schedules.

Nobody checked. Why would you check? Everyone already agreed. And professionally, we believed with exactly that same confidence: that a bearing was healthy until the day it wasn't. That a schedule was the same thing as a strategy. That if we wrote the plan down in triplicate, the machine would read it and comply. Every one of us was the smartest person in the plant, right up until the plant disagreed. This is a book about six decades of being completely sure, and what it cost us to find out we weren't.

I should say up front that I'm not writing this from a position of superiority. I lived through most of these decades myself, and if you'd caught me in the middle of any one of them, I'd have defended it with the same total confidence you're about to read on every page that follows. I've been Coetzee at the wall chart. I've been the man booking six hours against a three-hour job. I've built the plus-twenty-percent decoy budget. This isn't a book written by someone looking down at the plant floor from a safe distance. It's written by someone who was standing on it, agreeing with everyone else, the entire time.

Here's the part of the flat-earth story most of us never learned: the evidence was available embarrassingly early. Around 240 BC, a Greek scholar named Eratosthenes measured shadows in two Egyptian cities at the same moment on the same day, did some genuinely elegant geometry, and worked out the circumference of a curved earth to within a few percent of the modern figure — with a stick, a well, and some patience. The knowledge existed. It just didn't spread evenly, or fast, or all the way down to the people who most needed it, because knowing something and everyone around you acting on it are two entirely different timelines. That gap — between what's provably true and what a room full of confident, capable people actually does about it — is this whole book in one sentence.

Maintenance has had its own version of that gap in every single decade covered here, and the evidence, when you go looking for it afterward, is almost always sitting right there the whole time — a report nobody read past the executive summary, a statistic nobody thought applied to them, a quiet man in a corner of the plant floor doing the right thing for reasons nobody bothered to ask him about. It's not that we lacked the tools to know better. Knowing better has never been the hard part. Acting on it, on a Tuesday, under budget pressure, with a production target due at midnight, is the hard part. It has been the hard part since 1935, and if the last chapter of this book is honest with you, it still will be.

None of what follows is written to mock anyone in it, including — especially — myself. Every engineer, foreman, and manager in this book is doing the best they can with what they know at the time, which is the only way any of us have ever done anything. The joke, when there is one, is never really on the person. It's on the certainty. People are almost always doing something reasonable. It's the confidence that the reasonable thing is also the complete, permanently correct thing that gets every single one of us, in every single decade, without exception.

So: six decades, six certainties, and one very patient joke that takes its time landing. It starts in the only place it could — a plant floor sometime in the 1930s, where nobody had a philosophy yet, because nobody thought they needed one. Equipment ran until it didn't. When it didn't, someone came running. Everyone called that common sense. Nobody, yet, called it Chapter One.

— Johan Nortje