It becomes one entry, under your name, kept by itself.
Once Even Steven has your days in the seat and has checked them, what reaches us is one entry on a list. Your name is on it. It is for one kind of machine. It is not mixed with anybody else's, then or years later. And what goes out to a machine is a sealed package carrying none of your recordings.
One entry. One name. One kind of machine.
Not a pile of data somewhere. An entry, the way one tool on a shelf is one tool, with a label on it and a place of its own.
Your entry is built out of your days and nobody else's. The name on it is yours. It is for the family of machine you were working, which means the kind of machine rather than the model number: the hoe you sat in and its near relations, and nothing beyond that. It is not a general way of running heavy equipment. It is how you run that kind of machine.
On the list it sits beside other entries the way tools sit on a shelf. Side by side, each in its own place, every one liftable off without disturbing the rest. Nothing is tipped into a common bucket, and there is no bigger thing somewhere with everybody's work in it and one company's name on the front.
Everything else on this page falls out of that one fact. Kept apart is not a courtesy. It is what makes every other promise keepable, and the next section says why.
Nothing of yours is mixed with anybody else's.
It is the hardest thing on this site to believe, because it is not how these things usually go. It is also true, so it is worth saying more than once, in the different ways people ask it.
- It is not averaged with another hand's. Nobody's entry is made by putting several people's ways of working together and taking the middle of them.
- It is not tipped in with others to make one bigger thing. There is no blend here, and nothing on this site is one.
- Two names licensed on the same piece of paper are still two entries. Picked separately, counted separately, ended separately.
- Your name does not come off it anywhere along the way. It is on the entry, on the package that goes out, and on the row the hours are counted against.
A set is a shelf, not a stew.
A company can license several names at once, on one agreement, because one piece of paper is easier to live with than five. That changes the paperwork and it changes nothing else. Each name is still picked on its own before any work starts. Each name is still counted on its own. If one person says stop, that name comes off and the rest of the shelf carries on exactly as it was, because there was never anything holding them together but the paper.
Now the reason it has to be built that way, because this is not squeamishness. The day you say stop, yours has to come off — all of it, wherever it has got to. You can take a tin off a shelf. You cannot take one person's work back out of a stew, and anybody who tells you they can is telling you what suits them. Kept apart from the first day is the reason stopping means anything, the reason the hours against your name are yours and not a share of somebody else's, and the reason your name on it is a fact rather than a courtesy.
A sealed package goes out. A machine never gets your sessions.
This is the part most people picture wrongly, and reasonably so, because most of what has been built this decade works the other way.
What crosses
- A sealed package, made for the controls that machine already has.
- Your name, as the name the licence runs under, so the hours find their way back to you.
- A named person's signature on the package, so years afterwards anybody can see who signed for it and what it was.
- A short fingerprint of what went into it, which tells a receiving company whether the package has been meddled with and tells them nothing about the contents.
What does not
- Your days in the seat. Not one of them, not a piece of one. Not to a machine company, not to a kit outfit, not to whoever owns the machine.
- Anything saying where you were, who you were working for, or what job was on that day.
- Anything about you beyond the name it runs under.
The recordings stay where Even Steven keeps them, under your agreement, for what you said yes to and nothing else. What we build is made from them the way a part is made from a drawing, and it goes out without them. A machine never receives a session. That sentence is written on this site in half a dozen places, in the same words each time, because it is the one people check.
It has a practical end to it too. The outfit running the machine cannot go through your day, because there is no day there to go through. What they have is a package that does a piece of work on their machine and a name to charge the hours against. If they wanted to watch how you work they would have to ask you, the way anybody would, and that is a different conversation with a different piece of paper.
The receiving company can also look the package over and refuse it. Nothing is pushed onto a machine that its owner has not looked at and taken.
What travels is built from your days. The days do not travel.
Three things, and the first of them never moves at all.
Your skill stays where it has always been, which is in you. Nothing here shifts it and nothing here could. You go to work tomorrow on your own machine, at your own rate, and everything you know walks in the gate with you as it always has.
The record of those days stays with Even Steven, under the agreement you signed with them. It is information about you, so it is yours to allow and yours to withdraw, and those terms are written on their paper and not ours. What sits on our list is the entry built from that record. What goes to a machine is a package built from the entry. The first of the three never leaves the seat.
Which is also where the line on this page has to be drawn. If you want to know what was recorded, what is held, whose it is, and what is owed against it, that is a question for Even Steven and not for us. They hold your agreement, they hold your record and they answer for both. Write to this company about your own paper and all we could honestly do is hand you back across the fence. Why there is a fence at all is set out on the other company.
Ask Even Steven what a record of yours would be, and whose.
Your agreement, your record, your name and your money sit with them. They wrote it all out in plain words, and they are the ones who have to stand behind it.