We didn't call it a philosophy. We called it common sense, right up until common sense got a name, an acronym, and a consultant. This is the story of how maintenance grew up: from a foreman with a toolbox and a very short answer ("Is it running? Leave it alone."), through preventive schedules, RCM, TPM, CMMS, SAP PM, and ISO 55000, all the way to an algorithm that gets the same 3am call the foreman used to. Told through the plant floor characters who lived it (Coetzee at the wall chart, Botha chasing every new acronym, Attie and his crusher named Beatrice, Sarel who never chased anything and ran the best section in the plant anyway), this is a reliability engineer's confession that the tools kept changing and the humans, mostly, didn't. Every era was certain. This book is what it looks like, ninety years later, to notice where we were wrong, and laugh anyway. By Johan Nortje, who spent nearly three decades in reliability and asset management across mining and industrial plants, building his career around SAP PM and ISO 55000, before retiring to Vietnam, where he now writes and consults through NJN Consulting.