Maintenance never seems to be respected, but without it none of us could do what we do. It applies to garbage men, and even tech.

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.

I love this.

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

> Frustrated by the constant intrusions of child care and housework — “the back half of life,” as she called it — on her creative ambitions, she resolved to simply turn the work into her creative product. “Clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence,” she wrote in the treatise, which was published by Artforum in 1971. “Clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.”

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.

speaking of garbage, the website thinks I'm a robot