A repair ticket in my detective's shop has four fields, printed in the same order on every one. What came in. What the owner says is wrong. What is actually wrong. What it took to fix. She writes one for every job that crosses her bench, and she fills all four before she calls the job closed, because a ticket with a blank field is a job she has not finished thinking about.
I did not invent that form. For twenty years I wrote failure reports on the same skeleton. What the unit was. What the operator reported. What we found once we had it open. What the repair cost, in parts and labor and now and then a harder conversation. When I built a detective a shop to run, I gave her the record I already trusted, because it was the only one I knew how to keep. My own bench still runs on it, for the neighbors' lamps and the estate-sale finds, so the examples below are mine and not hers.
Field by field
The first field is what came in. A green desk lamp with a scorched socket, or one coffee grinder out of the three that came in the same week. The work of this field is identity and nothing else. It fastens the record to one object, so this lamp is never taken for the next one through the door.
The second field is what the owner says is wrong, kept in the owner's own words. The grinder runs but nothing comes out right. The lamp works if you jiggle the cord. I write it down as it is told to me and keep from turning it into a diagnosis, because the report is worth more before I improve it than after.
The third field is what is actually wrong, and this is where I write only what I can show. Not the cord the owner suspected but a cracked solder joint at the switch, the kind a meter reads out in a second. If I cannot point to it on the machine, it stays off the ticket, and whatever I was sure of stays my own business until it can be shown.
The fourth field is what it took to fix. A new cord and a bearing, and forty minutes at the bench. Now and then it runs to more than parts and hours. A fan comes back running, but the chip in its enamel will not match, and the owner has to choose whether to keep a mend that shows.
The two middle fields
The second field and the third almost never say the same thing, and that is nobody's fault. The owner reports the trouble from where she stands, in front of the machine and outside it. She gives me the noise it makes, or the morning it stopped. What is actually wrong sits a step behind that, at some part she has had no reason to see. A person reports the trouble that reaches her. The fault is usually somewhere she cannot get to. So the two fields are one failure told from two distances, and my work happened in the difference between them.
The last field
A fix has a price, and the fourth field is the question of cost. Most days the answer is parts and hours, and the field closes in a line. In a mystery it does not close so easily. The cost of setting right what is wrong with a town is never only parts and hours, and somebody has paid it long before my detective writes a word. The last field is where she has to enter what it came to. That is the field I had in mind writing Fixed to Death, my first novel, out August 4 and open now for pre-order.
Four questions, in order
A ticket is four questions, answered in order, and no field skipped. What came in. What the owner says is wrong. What is actually wrong. What it took to fix. I write a book the same way, in that order, because a story that jumps to the cost before it has settled what is truly wrong has cheated somewhere. The book is done when the last field is filled and not a page before. The rest is only keeping the record straight.