Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

by Serguey Shinder

I was depping for a bass player who had broken his wrist, six songs, two days' notice. I did what anyone would do. I found the recordings, sat down with headphones, and learned the parts properly, note for note, including a descending run in the third song that took me most of an evening to get clean.

At the gig I played it perfectly and it was wrong.

Not in any way an audience would notice. Wrong in the sense that the guitarist glanced over at me during it, the drummer did something defensive with the hi-hat, and a part that should have carried the song instead sat awkwardly on top of it. Afterwards the guitarist explained, kindly, that they had stopped playing it that way about four years earlier. The recorded version had a run in it. The live version had three notes and a lot of space, because the singer had started holding a phrase over that bar and the run was in her way.

Nobody had written this down. There was no reason to. Everyone in the band was present on the night it changed, and it changed the way those things do, by one person leaving a gap and the others noticing it was better.

The recording was accurate. It was also a photograph of a Tuesday in a studio four years ago, and I had treated it as the specification. The actual specification lived in the shared memory of four people, and the only way to get at it was to ask, and I had not asked because I did not know there was anything to ask about. Everything I had was internally consistent.

I think about that more often than any technical failure I have had, because the shape of it is everywhere. The documentation is not lying. The schema comment is not lying. The design document was true when written. What none of them can tell you is which parts the people who work there stopped believing two years ago, and which of the things they do now are so obvious to everyone present that nobody would ever think to record them.

So my routine changed. When I learn something from a recording or a document I now assume I have the old version, and I ask one specific question of somebody who was there. Not what does this do, which gets me the written answer back. What I ask is whether anything about it has changed and nobody has got round to updating it. The word nobody does a great deal of work in that sentence. It gives the other person permission to tell you something slightly embarrassing about their own house.

I got the run right and the song wrong. The part I needed was the part that nobody had bothered to write down, because everyone who mattered already knew it.

– Serguey Asael Shinder