Frothly

Audio Logs · Episode 51

Calibrations

Why the most important work in infrastructure is the maintenance nobody sees.

Transcript

  1. Julian Pankratz

    This is Audio Logs. I’m Julian Pankratz, and I’m joined by Frothly’s new Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Pasqal Haneumann. I should tell listeners I tried to book you last month and you said you were in the middle of some calibrations.

  2. Dr. Pasqal Haneumann

    I was. The relay network had drifted by a fraction of a percent. It would not have mattered for a year, perhaps two. But drift that does not matter yet is precisely the drift one should correct.

  3. Julian Pankratz

    Is that your philosophy of infrastructure?

  4. Dr. Pasqal Haneumann

    It is most of it. People admire the building of machines. Very few admire their maintenance, and yet maintenance is where machines spend nearly all of their lives. A system is designed once and kept running ten thousand times.

  5. Julian Pankratz

    Before Frothly you looked after a fleet of ships.

  6. Dr. Pasqal Haneumann

    Long-haul vessels, for the von Valancius family. Some of their systems were older than the crews who operated them. The documentation had been lost generations ago. What remained was practice: the order in which things should be woken, the sounds that meant trouble, the small courtesies each system seemed to prefer.

  7. Julian Pankratz

    Courtesies?

  8. Dr. Pasqal Haneumann

    I choose the word deliberately. Our Human Factors group published a paper this month on what they call machine rituals. I was a co-author, and I will confess I recognized myself in it. When you have kept a machine alive for twenty years, you develop habits that look, from the outside, rather like devotion.

  9. Julian Pankratz

    Do you think the rituals work?

  10. Dr. Pasqal Haneumann

    Many of them do. Not for mystical reasons. A ritual is often the only surviving record of something true: that a component needs time to warm, that a certain order avoids a fault no one wrote down. I would rather preserve the ritual and later learn its reason than discard it and learn its reason the hard way.

  11. Julian Pankratz

    What will you change at Frothly?

  12. Dr. Pasqal Haneumann

    Very little that anyone will notice, if I do it well. More monitoring. Fewer single points of failure. Every system will have written procedures, and every procedure will have a person who has actually performed it. And we will thank the systems that serve us well. I am told this is unusual. I find it simply correct.

  13. Julian Pankratz

    You’ve said before that you trust machines more than people.

  14. Dr. Pasqal Haneumann

    I said that machines are more consistent. The flesh is weak; it forgets, it tires, it skips a step at the end of a long night. A machine does exactly what it was built to do. That is its virtue and its danger. Our job is to make sure what it was built to do is what we actually want.

  15. Julian Pankratz

    Dr. Haneumann, thank you.

  16. Dr. Pasqal Haneumann

    Thank you. And thank you to the recording equipment, which has performed admirably.