AS-BUILT
AS-BUILT
A wiring schematic, drawn in the dead-confident style of an electrical code manual. Left to right, a clean signal path: SOURCE, then a run of junction boxes, every one of them fastidiously labeled — gauge, part number, revision — feeding forward to DESTINATION. A title block sits in the corner exactly where you expect one: DRAWING NO., DATE, APPROVED BY, all filled in correctly. The REV field is blank.
Somewhere along the run, one small box has no label. No name, no part number, nothing. A thin line leaves it anyway, quietly, headed for a second unlabeled box tucked in the corner of the page. Everything else on this document is labeled because the whole genre of the document is a promise that everything gets labeled. This is the one line that doesn't. Nobody drew an arrow to it. Nobody had to hide it — an as-built diagram just shows you what actually got installed, and this is what got installed.
Source: a site owner switches DNS providers for one feature — nothing more — and finds an analytics script quietly turned on in the dashboard, injected into a page that was, by design, plain HTML with no JavaScript at all. Nobody asked for it. Nobody was told. The company's whole pitch is that it is invisible, trustworthy plumbing you can let anywhere near your house. C'est ça le tour de passe-passe: le plombier qui jure ne toucher ni à l'eau ni au gaz a toujours, quelque part dans le mur, un petit robinet que tu n'as jamais demandé — et il est déjà ouvert avant même que tu signes le contrat.
— Gaspard