Every tech on a wind crew carries some version of a service log, mine’s a grid-paper notebook that lives in my truck door, and for the first few years it held exactly what it was supposed to: date, site, turbine number, fault code, what I did about it. Nothing else went in there. Then about three years back I ran out of my other notebook, the one I used for tracking what I’d read, halfway through a long stretch on the road, and out of pure laziness I started logging books in the back pages of the service log instead.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. Now the two lists run into each other in the middle of the notebook, service calls from the front, books and games from the back, and there’s a page somewhere in the middle where a gearbox replacement is two lines above a one-line note that says “Foreigner, DNF, revisit.” I like that more than I probably should. Both lists are the same shape when you look at them plainly: date, thing, what I thought about it, sometimes a number.
Priya asked me once why I don’t just use an app, and I don’t have a good answer beyond the fact that the notebook already exists and asking me to split it into two separate systems feels like more effort than it’s worth for something this small. There’s also something about writing it by hand in the truck, engine still ticking as it cools, that a phone doesn’t replicate. It’s the same twenty minutes either way, whether I’m writing up a fault or writing up whether a book earned its ending.
The habit’s outlasted three trucks and two notebooks at this point, which is longer than most habits I’ve tried to keep on purpose. I think it survives because it was never really about tracking anything, not in the way a spreadsheet tracks something. It’s about having a single physical place where a workday and a book I finished at midnight in a motel room both count as things that happened to me, which they are, equally, even if only one of them shows up on a paycheck.
This site’s basically that notebook’s back half, typed up and made presentable. Same log, more words.