The Engineer Who Saved Water
Eighteen months into construction, they tested the aqueduct. Water pooled at the intake and stopped.
The governor’s face went red. The most expensive monument in Gaul had become its most expensive failure.
Imagine an engineer, let's call him Marcus, walking the thirty-mile length three times, rechecking every measurement. Marcus obsessed over gradient: eight thumb-widths of decline for every 5,000 feet of distance. Get it wrong, and water wouldn’t flow.
The problem was nearly invisible: one section had settled two inches too low. Less than the width of a fist, but enough to break the flow to 50,000 people.
He ordered that section rebuilt urgently, without explanation. Workers tore out good stonework and raised it exactly two inches. Three weeks later, water rushed through the channel and filled fountains in Nîmes (then: Nemausus). Officials took credit. Citizens cheered.
Marcus’s name appears on no monument. His fix is buried in the stonework. Two thousand years later, water could probably still flow if it had to — because one engineer measured in digits while everyone else thought in glory.
My Own Digits
Take the quarterly financial close that completed two days early. What made it possible wasn’t inspiration but preparation: data validation scripts written months earlier, automated reconciliations that caught discrepancies before they compounded, quick calls that surfaced problems early, quiet nudges that kept surprises from piling up. The CFO praised the “smooth process.” Like Marcus’s two-inch correction, the real work was hidden.
Or consider the formal presentations that flow seamlessly: narrative clean, transitions smooth, every figure accurate to the decimal. What the audience never sees: the urgent data repair that made accuracy possible, the system fixes that prevented crashes, the cleaned records that eliminated contradictions. When operations succeeds, there’s no trace of the work, only the illusion that things were always meant to work this way.
The Cruel Mathematics
There’s a mathematics to operational work as precise as Marcus’s gradient calculations: the better you become, the less visible your contribution appears. Fix a critical bug before launch, and the smooth release gets credited to the development team. Prevent a data breach through careful protocols, and no one celebrates the attack that never happened. Design a process so robust it never fails, and people assume it was always that way.
The better you prevent problems, the less people notice. But we Ops people measure success through non-events: no outages, no angry customers, no sprint blown up at the last minute. Like water flowing through ancient channels, background precision enables visible success.
After a decade, I’ve internalized Marcus’s stance toward systems. I’ve stopped asking if something might fail and instead map out how it will fail, then build around those inevitabilities. When I scan project celebrations, I see what others miss: the single point of failure in the deployment pipeline, the manual process that will break when someone takes paternity leave, the dependency chain that will collapse if a vendor contract isn’t renewed.
The Loneliness of Scanning
This perspective carries costs Marcus never had to consider. You notice weak points during celebrations and flag risks while colleagues high-five. You carry a perpetual background process that scans for entropy, present in the moment but simultaneously running failure simulations: a low hum in the back of your head, scanning for cracks even as the champagne’s being poured.
There’s loneliness in being the person who scans for approaching disasters while everyone else focuses on the horizon. You become the voice of caution in rooms full of optimism, the one quietly asking “what if?” while everyone else is already celebrating. You worry colleagues see you as inherently negative — not because you are, but because your job is to imagine what could go wrong.
I’ve caught myself doing it outside work too: tracing exit routes in restaurants, noting load-bearing walls in old buildings, clocking the interpersonal dynamics that hold friend groups together. It shows up while running on bridges, scanning for structural limits; at concerts, where I note emergency exits. Operational thinking becomes a way of being in the world, a constant mental safety net no one else sees.
The Unexpected Intimacy
Yet there’s also unexpected intimacy in this work. You know systems the way a parent knows a child’s moods: which processes run hot under load, which workflows break silently, which team members need extra support during crunch time. You develop genuine affection for unglamorous details like the elegance of a well-tuned monitoring alert, the satisfaction of a process that handles edge cases gracefully.
When gratitude comes, it arrives privately: a colleague mentioning they don’t worry about certain things because they know you’re watching, relief in someone’s voice when they call during a crisis. These aren’t public victories, but they’re real.
Like understanding the interior channels of an aqueduct — not the impressive arches everyone sees, but the precise stone conduits that actually carry the water — we work with quiet, hard-to-see tolerances. Too steep and the system fails catastrophically; too shallow and nothing flows at all.
What Endures
Two thousand years later, Pont-du-Gard still stands and water could probably still flow if it had to because Roman engineers measured in digits while everyone else thought in glory. The aqueduct works so well that visitors assume it was inevitable, that Roman engineering was simply superior, that precision was built into the culture.
They don’t know about the (imaginary) crisis. They don’t need to.
This is the paradox of operational excellence: the higher the quality, the more invisible the contribution. But there’s quiet dignity in building systems that make other work possible.
Sometimes I see it in my own work, the fixes no one will ever know about, and allow myself a quiet moment of recognition. The water still flows.
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