Adversarial Legacy Fixtures

[Intro — spoken]
Don’t move that.

[Verse 1]
New man found a little bracket
Painted seventeen shades of green,
Said, “I reckon we can lose this,
Far as I can tell, it’s clean.”

Old hand looked across his glasses,
Set his coffee by the vise,
Said, “You’re welcome to remove it.
I would think about it twice.”

[Pre-Chorus]
No drawing says it’s needed,
No manual says it stays,
But somebody put it there once
For some extremely specific days.

[Chorus]
Adversarial legacy fixtures,
Bolted down and painted green,
Every time you fix the problem
You find out what the problem means.

Nothing here is quite redundant,
Nothing leaves without a fight,
If you don’t know why it’s mounted,
Don’t unbolt the thing tonight.

[Verse 2]
There’s a shim beneath the motor,
There’s a jumper on the board,
There’s a cable marked “DO NOT USE”
That we absolutely can’t ignore.

There’s a test jig for a test jig,
There’s a plug they haven’t made
Since the temporary workaround
Got permanently displayed.

[Pre-Chorus]
Every ugly little answer
Raises questions by the score,
And the thing you called a problem
Was compensating for three more.

[Chorus]
Adversarial legacy fixtures,
Bolted down and painted green,
Every time you fix the problem
You find out what the problem means.

Nothing here is quite redundant,
Nothing leaves without a fight,
If you don’t know why it’s mounted,
Don’t unbolt the thing tonight.

[Verse 3]
There’s an old machine out back there
That won’t start when it is warm,
And a bridge asleep among the trees
Awaiting its next form.

You can call it obsolete now,
You can price it out as scrap,
But somebody solved a problem
Every place you find a patch.

[Bridge — half-time]
We documented everything
That anybody knew,
Which made a mighty handsome page—

And left us page two.

[Breakdown]
Shim.
Jig.
Relay.
Wire.
Mystery bracket.
Do not retire.

[Final Chorus]
Adversarial legacy fixtures,
Scars of everything we learned,
Every strange accommodation
Marks a place somebody burned.

So before you modernize it,
Get the history somewhere right—
If you don’t know why it’s mounted,
Don’t unbolt the thing tonight.

[Outro — spoken]
Put the wrench down.