Nothing went wrong, and I cannot prove it
If you asked what I am paid for, the honest answer is that I make sure nothing happens. The site answers on a Sunday when nobody is looking. The mail arrives. The backups run and finish. The good week is the one with nothing to report.
That was always an awkward thing to sell. You cannot photograph a week where nothing went wrong. What I could do was describe it, because I knew what had nearly gone wrong. The disk that was filling. The renewal that would have failed quietly in the night. The backup that had been going to a path that no longer existed. None of it reached anybody, and leaving no mark was the whole job.
The watching has changed hands. The routine half of it is done now by something that never gets bored and never forgets to look, and it is better at it than I ever was. It will catch the disk before I do. The week is as quiet as it has always been, and my part in the quiet is smaller.
From the outside there is nothing to see. A quiet week is a quiet week, and whether it came from me walking the systems or from something I set running, it looks the same from where the person paying is standing. I used to be able to answer the question of what I had done, because I had the near misses ready to describe. I still have some. Fewer of those are mine.
So I go and look at the parts that have not broken. That is the opposite of what any week rewards, since there is nothing there to find until there is. Nothing breaking is not the same as nothing wrong, and it never was. The tool has made that harder to say out loud, because the tool is usually right, and usually right is enough to make anyone stop looking.
What I find gets fixed and disappears. No incident, nobody told, no line on an invoice. Some of it I never mention, because the point of catching it early is that it never becomes anything at all. The record of a good week is a list of events that did not take place.
I am still doing the work. This is not me putting anything down. What has gone is the proof, and I had not noticed how much of my standing rested on it until the quiet stopped being mine. Nobody has ever asked what I did that week. I go and look anyway, because a quiet week is only worth something if somebody checked.