Buddy story · Maintenance
Two years in, and the news is that there is no news
A deliberately low-frequency pairing for two people whose weeks are, by design, uneventful.
- Paired
- September 2025
- Cadence
- Monthly
- Status
- ongoing
Benedikt set this one up after noticing that maintenance members were being paired at a weekly cadence and quietly finding it a chore, because there is very little to report and reporting nothing every week starts to feel like failure.
Monthly suits them. What they actually talk about is the thing almost nobody writes about: what it is like when the interesting part is over, when nobody asks any more, and when the daily practice is simply a Wednesday. Matt describes an odd flatness in the first maintenance year that he was not warned about and did not have a word for.
There is a guide now at maintenance, the part nobody writes about, and a fair amount of it came from these two.
Nobody prepares you for the boredom, or for the fact that the boredom is the good outcome.
Monthly is right. Weekly made me feel I owed somebody an event.