A lesson to attach to endurance, I have on occasion been asked to do 
temporary work. Usually it means for something nobody had previously 
thought about and the budget is running furiously into negative math. 
Some of the temporary work is still there twenty or so years later. Once 
the project is finished and the team dismantled and moves on there is no 
longer any memory. The chances of temporary work still being there after 
we are dead and gone are pretty high.

Add this up to walking into a situation where you have to figure out 
what is going on with a structure that has seen multiple interventions 
and the need to understand, "What the hell were they thinking?" I 
believe that we all of us working together, when we do, want to do 
something better -- a bit more thoughtful at least -- than to extend the 
process of screwing up.

Are we adding to some long departed carpenter a load of bad karma when 
we sit in the basement, look at their work, and laugh at the absurdity 
of the 'temporary' repair that by it's very existence accelerates the 
deterioration of the structure? Or when we notice that the offensive 
threaded rods are stainless steel and our subsequent realization that 
someone must have wrote this in a spec? Or is it our own debt that we 
are working on with a prayer to avoid this potential for a future 
negative outcome for ourselves in our interventions? Is it a struggle to 
do better than what we see as evidence of not very good reason?

So, I think it interesting that whereas one would say narrow the date of 
a structure by the nails, that one can also kind-of interpolate the date 
of interventions by the evidence of "What were they thinking?"

][<en

[log in to unmask] wrote:

> In a message dated 7/10/2007 4:48:00 AM W. Europe Daylight Time, 
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
>     Maybe but they want to sell product and since they make the Terne
>     II coating I think they would have a conflict.
>

--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>