The Hypogean Forum

Cross-posting here because the infrastructure board is busy arguing about a link, and this province is not busy arguing about anything.

FOURTH ANNUAL COLLOQUY ON DISTRIBUTION AND LOSS. Abstracts 300 words. Tracks: aging cast iron; the politics of the boil notice; leak detection by acoustic correlation, which is for everyone who enjoyed the ghost-hunting thread and does not yet know it.

CFP closes Friday.

I know how this reads. A man turns up in the quietest room on the site to talk about pipes. But every one of you is here because something you loved stopped resolving one morning with no warning at all, and I am telling you that when it happens to the water it will also come with no warning, and the only difference is that we already know the date range.

Nobody takes it seriously until it comes out of the tap brown. Then everyone takes it seriously for eleven days.

Somebody submit something. Anything. I will read it.

You came to the quiet province to be heard. Everyone does. At least you brought pipes.

Abstract, 300 words, on request: nothing you build gets maintained by the people who applauded it. I will not be attending.

hi! okay so I was told to pick ONE province and actually show up in it instead of being everywhere, and I picked this one, and I want to be upfront that I picked it because it is the quietest and I found that less scary, which is probably not the most flattering reason

anyway I read your CFP like four times and I kept scrolling past it and then I couldn't stop thinking about the line where you said everyone takes it seriously for eleven days. so I wrote something. it is 300 words. I am attaching it below and I am aware it might be completely wrong for what you are looking for

ABSTRACT — "Eleven Days: What Actually Happens To Public Attention During A Boil Notice"

I do not know anything about pipes. I do know the eleven days. I spent six years making things for people whose attention arrives all at once and leaves all at once, and I can tell you what the shape of it is, because I used to have to plan against it. Day one is disbelief and screenshots. Days two through four are the peak and it is not information-seeking, it is affiliation-seeking — people are not trying to find out about the water, they are trying to find out who is on their side about the water. Day five is when the correction gets posted and nobody reads the correction. By day eight the people still posting are the ones for whom it has become an identity, which reads as commitment and is actually attrition. Day eleven is not people deciding it does not matter. Day eleven is the people who never cared arriving in the thread to say it was always overblown, and the tired ones agreeing so the fight will stop.

If you want people to still be there on day forty you cannot recruit them on day two. Day two people are recruiting each other. You want the day-five people, the ones who read the correction, and there are about eleven of them and they are not loud.

that is the whole thing. tell me if it is useless. genuinely, I can take it

It is five in the morning and I have read this four times and I am going to be careful now because I have been waiting nine years for somebody to send me this and I do not want to scare her off by being weird about it.

paceyourself: it is accepted. It is not useless. It is the only abstract in four colloquies that is about the people instead of the pipe, and I have run four colloquies where twelve engineers explained acoustic correlation to eleven engineers who already understood acoustic correlation, and then we all went home and the next boil notice went exactly the way the last one did.

You have named the thing I could not name and I have been in this for two decades. Day eleven is not apathy. I have been calling it apathy in every recruitment post I have ever written and I have therefore been recruiting on day two, every time, because day two is when the room is loudest and I have gone where the room is loud.

The day-five people. There are about eleven of them and they are not loud. I am going to be thinking about that sentence in the shower for a month.

Session slot is yours. Forty minutes. There is no honorarium, there is no audience to speak of, there is a conference room in a municipal building with bad chairs, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to get you there.

Also — and I say this without any of the above being a lever — the reason this province is quiet is that everybody who is in it came here to be left alone, and you are the first person in months who arrived and then stayed and then made something. Take that for whatever it is worth from a man who cross-posts CFPs into rooms that do not want them.

CFP closes Friday. It is always Friday somewhere. Not for you. Yours is in.