MAINTENANCE is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.
Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil in maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on. Plants tend the life of the soil they grow in. Beavers maintain their dams and thereby the pond that protects them. Humans maintain their bodies, their vehicles, their homes, and their cities, along with much else. Nearly everything worth maintaining is nested in something larger even more worth maintaining.
But so much of doing maintenance is tiresome. Brush the damn teeth, change the damn oil. They are unrewarding chores—repetitive, boring, often frustrating, and endless. Since that part of maintenance is a pain, we shirk it, defer it, fail to budget time or money for it, let it drop to the bottom of the priority list. That’s easy to do because the necessity of maintenance accumulates invisibly and gradually. Then suddenly one day the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops in a turmoil of disruption, expense, and blame.
The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It it easy to put off, and yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later.
Neglect kills.
What to do?
Here’s a suggestion: Soften the paradox and the misbehavior it encourages by expanding the term “maintenance” beyond referring only to preventive maintenance to stave off the trauma of repair--brushing the damn teeth, etc. Let “maintenance” mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going. In that perspective, occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually replacing the thing is part of the process.
Maintenance in this larger sense has nothing optional about it. The necessity of maintenance doesn’t accumulate invisibly, it is understood as a given. When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it. If it’s a child, to keep it fed. If it’s a knife, to keep it sharp.
This book, I’m pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general. It asks: What can be learned if you think about all the varieties of maintenance at the same time? I doubt if there are any non-trivial “laws” of maintenance to be discovered. All I can offer here is to muse across a representative sample of maintenance domains and see what emerges.
The logic of the book is this:
- Start with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions— a true story told as a fable.
- Explore the insights from several domains of maintenance that everyone is aware of—vehicles, buildings, cities.
- At the same time, see what social scientists and system engineers have to say about upkeep and repair in those familiar domains.
- Then explore the most highly disciplined maintenance frontiers, which are exotic to most people—manufacturing, aircraft and spacecraft, software, and Japanese culture.
- Apply what has been learned to the largest domains that humanity is becoming obliged to take on the care of—civilization and the planet.
- Zoom back in to individual humans and their lifelong health.
- End with the nature of maintainers and the honor owed them.
The book is an invitation. Using maintenance as a frame of reference is—I hope to show—a fruitful way to rethink all manner of things.
—SB, May 2023