Plain Lab · logbook

Job Notes Insert

Forty-four job cards ask the same five things every time a job starts, and seventy-nine ruled pages hold everything a card was never built to record.

Specification

Trim: 127 × 177.8 mm · 5 × 7 in
Pages: 128
Leaves: 64
Sheets: 32
Signatures: 4 × 32pp
Spine: 7.32 mm
Paper: white
Ruling: lined
Ruling pitch: 7.14 mm · 20.25 pt · 9/32 in
Rows per page: 20

A job card exists because a memory of a Tuesday fades faster than anyone expects. Forty-four cards ask the same handful of things on every job: what the work was, what changed on arrival, what was actually done, and who signed it off. Filled in from memory once the shift is over, a card tends to record what the writer thinks should have happened rather than what did.

Seventy-nine college-ruled pages follow the cards, for the part no fixed card was built to hold: a supplier who never called back, a part ordered twice by mistake, a brief the client changed halfway through the job. A card with five boxes cannot carry a paragraph, and a paragraph is sometimes exactly what the job needs written down.

I have filled out a card after the fact more than once, working from a phone photo and a rough guess at the order things happened. It reads fine on the page. It is not the same record as one written the day the job was done.

What is inside

Job cards: 44pp; What the work was, what changed on arrival, what was done, and who signed it off.
Notes: 79pp; College-ruled space, 7.14 mm pitch, for anything a fixed card cannot hold.

The film

Page by page

A vertical film from our own bench — this page contacts nobody's server to play it, and downloads nothing until you press play.

A vertical film, 27 seconds: the ruling page and the figures printed on its last leaf. Synthesised ambient bed, no dialogue — captions in three languages.