Field note · 4 November 2025

Drawing a restoration so a board can follow it

Fourteen switching steps that make sense in a logbook become a wall of prose in a board pack. A time-ladder with bay names does the work the paragraph cannot.

A restoration that took fourteen steps is clear to the people who stood in the corridor. In a board pack it becomes a paragraph that directors skim and then argue about. The argument is rarely about engineering. It is about not being able to see which bay opened first.

A time-ladder, not a mural

We draw a ladder. Time runs down the page. Each rung is a switching action or a confirmed state, labelled with the name the night crew uses — including the unofficial ones, if those are what people say when they point at the panel. A neighbouring utility that has never visited your substation can still follow a ladder. They cannot follow a paragraph that assumes they know “the old bus.”

Greyscale is part of the job

Colour plates look serious until someone copies them on municipal paper. We issue a greyscale version in which tripped elements still read as tripped. If a drawing depends on a red that becomes grey soup, it is not finished.

What we will not decorate

Icons, glow, and mimic-screen styling belong on the wall of the control room. A briefing plate has to sit in a folder with a coffee ring. Giorgi’s test is whether the third photocopy still shows the order of events. If it does not, we redraw.