I worked tech support for nearly 20 years on various things, big networking equipment, mainframe equipment. Some companies paid really well and made their money / stayed afloat through hard times because they had a reputation for providing high quality tech support. But in the end every company seems to devalue it eventually. Quality of management starts to dip, resources are slowly siphoned away, some management mistakes that because problems get reported through support channels that is somehow always support's fault. Things start to turn and it goes bad, someone decides it looks good on a resume to outsource and so on.

Before I left my last support job the local manager decided to cancel the quarterly pizza party (maybe couple hundred bucks in pizza) to save money ... I was taking a buy out (I was fortunate) and as a fun way to go out I held my own pizza party, spent my own money ;) Company pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and I held the pizza party.

I moved on and now I write code where you get paid more / valued more / more respect making new things. It's hard to avoid the fact that maintenance is just not respected.

For anyone interested, The Maintainers conference/community feels like a spiritual successor: https://themaintainers.org/events/

Really interesting to have back-to-back sessions on shipping container infra, cochlear implants, then social care-work

There's more here than just the sanitation narrative, she's tapping into the focus Zen puts on the present, that these every day chores ARE the meditation, or in this case, the artistic expression.

Genius.

If I recall correctly, there is a photograph of the mirrored truck in Suzi Gablik's book The Re-enchantment of Art. And here is some additional information and images:

https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/mierle-laderman-ukeless-ode-t...