The employees at a small Nebraska water plant have been writing letters to their eventual replacements for twenty-nine years.

This is a story about a small municipal water treatment plant in a small town in central Nebraska, the seven employees who currently work at that plant, the specific arrangement they have collectively developed and sustained over the past twenty-nine years, and the specific set of documents that arrangement has, over those twenty-nine years, produced.

The plant — which I will not name, at the request of the town’s water superintendent — serves a town of approximately four thousand five hundred people in the central portion of Nebraska. It processes approximately six hundred thousand gallons of water per day. It has been in continuous operation since 1972. It is staffed, at the time of this writing, by seven full-time employees, whose specific job titles are, in Nebraska municipal water infrastructure, the standard set: one water superintendent, two senior water operators, two junior water operators, one laboratory technician, and one maintenance technician.

The current superintendent — I will call him Warren, because he chose the name, and because when I asked why, he said, “It is the name of a man who has been doing a specific job for a long time and does not need to explain it to anyone, which I have decided is what I am,” which I found sufficient — is fifty-eight. He has been at the plant for thirty-one years. He has been the superintendent for eight of those years. He is, at the time of this writing, planning to retire in approximately eighteen months.

He is, in that time, preparing to write a specific letter.

The letter is the specific thing this story is about.

The origin

The arrangement, in Warren’s careful telling, began in the summer of 1996.

Warren was, at the time, twenty-eight years old. He had been at the plant for approximately three years. He had, in that time, been trained by the plant’s most senior employee — a man Warren has told me is named Elmer, and who was, at the time, sixty-two years old and preparing to retire.

Elmer had, in Warren’s careful account, been at the plant for approximately thirty-four years. He had, in that time, seen the plant through two major renovations, three specific water-quality emergencies, and — in the specific way of long-tenured municipal employees — a very large number of small operational changes that were not, in the strict sense, documented anywhere.

Elmer had, in Warren’s account, been the specific person who taught Warren everything Warren knew about the plant. He had done this over the course of Warren’s first three years, in the specific informal way that long-tenured municipal employees teach newer employees: through daily conversation, through hands-on demonstrations, through the specific quiet reference to small operational details that would come up in the ordinary course of a workday.

Elmer’s retirement was, in Warren’s account, scheduled for the last Friday of August 1996.

On Elmer’s last day, in the specific afternoon following the small retirement lunch the plant’s staff had organized for him, Elmer approached Warren.

He was, in Warren’s account, holding a manila envelope.

He handed the envelope to Warren.

Elmer said, in Warren’s account, the following: “This is for you. I have been writing it for the past six months. It contains things I want you to know. Some of them are things I have already told you. Some of them are things I did not tell you because I did not think of them until I was writing them down. I would like you to read it. I would like you to keep it. I would like you to add to it, if you want to, over the years.”

Warren, in his account, took the envelope. He asked Elmer what was in it.

Elmer said, in Warren’s account: “Read it and see.”

Elmer then, in his own account, walked to his car and drove home.

Warren has told me he did not, at that moment, read the letter.

Warren has told me he took the letter home. He has told me he read it that evening, sitting at the kitchen table of his small house, after his wife and small son had gone to bed.

The letter, in Warren’s careful description, was twenty-three pages long.

It was, in Warren’s assessment, “the most careful document I had ever seen a person write.”

Warren’s letter, from Elmer

I want to describe the letter carefully, because it established, without meaning to, the specific form the arrangement would take for the following twenty-nine years.

The letter was, in Warren’s careful description, divided into three sections.

The first section — approximately six pages — contained specific practical information about the plant that Elmer felt he had not, over three years of training Warren, adequately communicated. This section included, among other things: the specific behavior of a particular valve in the plant’s filtration system that would, under specific conditions, need to be manually adjusted; the specific quirks of the plant’s older chlorination equipment during the specific summer months when the town’s water demand exceeded certain thresholds; the specific historical reasons for the specific configuration of the plant’s backup power system; and a specific list of small maintenance items that Elmer had, over the years, developed the habit of performing on specific schedules that were not, in the strict sense, part of the plant’s formal maintenance schedule.

Warren has told me this section was, in the years that followed, extraordinarily useful.

He has told me it saved him, in his estimation, approximately four hundred hours of his own time over the following decade, in the form of specific operational problems he was able to diagnose and address quickly because Elmer had, in the letter, explained them.

The second section — approximately eight pages — contained specific information about the specific people Warren would, in the years to come, be working with. This section included, among other things: the specific personal circumstances of each of the plant’s other employees that Elmer had, over years of working with them, come to know; the specific ways each of them preferred to be approached with specific kinds of problems; the specific things each of them was good at that were not, in the strict sense, part of their job description; the specific things each of them was not good at; and a specific set of small observations about the specific personal history of each employee’s relationship with the plant.

Warren has told me this section was, in the years that followed, useful in a specific and different way. It was useful, he has told me, because it allowed him to understand the plant’s other employees not as generic municipal workers but as specific people with specific histories that were, in Elmer’s account, worth paying attention to.

The third section — approximately nine pages — contained something else.

The third section

The third section, in Warren’s careful description, contained what Elmer had labeled, in his own handwriting at the top of the first page: “Things I have thought about, in the course of thirty-four years of doing this work.”

The section was, in Warren’s assessment, the specific thing that made the letter unusual.

The section contained, in Warren’s careful summary, the following.

It contained Elmer’s specific thoughts about what municipal water work is, and what it is not. It contained Elmer’s specific thoughts about the specific responsibility of providing clean water to a small town of people who do not, in any ordinary sense, know your name. It contained Elmer’s specific thoughts about the specific slow rhythms of a small municipal utility, and the specific ways those rhythms will, over years and decades, shape a person’s sense of time. It contained Elmer’s specific thoughts about the specific small failures he had, over thirty-four years, watched the plant undergo, and about the specific small victories he had, over the same period, watched the plant achieve. It contained Elmer’s specific thoughts about the specific ways he had, over thirty-four years, changed as a person as a result of the work.

It contained, in the final page of the section, the following.

Elmer had written, in his careful handwriting: “I have decided, in the specific act of writing this letter, that this letter should not, in the strict sense, be a letter only from me to you. I have decided that this letter should be, in some way that I do not fully understand yet, the beginning of a specific practice. I would like to suggest — I am, at sixty-two, not going to be around to enforce this suggestion — that whoever eventually replaces you, when you retire, receive a similar letter from you. I would like to suggest that the specific practice of writing a letter to the specific next person who will do your job, containing the specific things you have learned in the course of doing it, is a practice that a place like this plant might benefit from continuing.”

He had written: “I do not know if you will do this. I do not know if anyone else at the plant, when their times come, will do this. I would like to suggest that it might be worth doing. I would like the suggestion to be considered.”

He had written: “I would also like to suggest, if the practice does continue in some form, that each letter be — in the specific way this letter is — as long as it needs to be. That it not be short. That it not be summary. That it contain, in the specific way of a person who has done a specific job for a very long time telling the specific next person who will do that job everything they can think of, all of the specific things that the departing person has, in the course of their work, come to know.”

He had written: “I would like this to be a practice because I have, in the past six months of writing this letter, come to understand something specific about what it has meant to do this work. I have come to understand that the work is, in a specific way I would not have said aloud if I had not written this letter, mine. That it has been mine for thirty-four years. That in the process of writing it down, for the specific next person who will do it, I have — for the first time — been able to see the specific shape of what I have been doing all this time.”

He had written: “I would like other people to have this experience. I would like other people to have the specific experience of writing down, for their eventual replacement, what they have learned. I think it would be, for them, the specific gift the writing has been for me.”

He had written, at the very bottom of the page: “I do not know if you will keep this practice. I am asking you to consider it. I am asking you to consider that a small municipal water treatment plant, in a small town in central Nebraska, might — if the specific practice were kept — become the specific kind of workplace where every person who works here writes down, for the specific next person, everything they have learned. I think this would be, in some quiet way, a specific and rare thing.”

He had signed the letter: “Elmer. In gratitude for the thirty-four years, and in careful hope for what you will do with the specific next set of years.”

What Warren did with the letter

I asked Warren, in each of our three conversations, what he had done with Elmer’s letter over the past twenty-nine years.

He has told me he has, over twenty-nine years, done the following.

He has kept the letter. It is, at the time of this writing, in a specific file cabinet in his office at the plant. It has been in that file cabinet, in the specific form of the manila envelope Elmer gave him, for twenty-nine years.

He has reread the letter, in his own careful accounting, approximately fourteen times over the twenty-nine years. He has told me he rereads it, in general, when he is facing a specific situation at the plant that he does not, in the strict sense, know how to handle. He has told me the letter has, in most of these cases, contained a specific piece of advice that either directly addressed his situation or that gave him the specific sense of context he needed to figure out how to address it himself.

He has, in his own account, been slowly writing his own letter for the past six years.

He has told me the letter is, at the time of this writing, approximately forty-one pages long. He has told me it is, in his own assessment, “still not finished. I have another eighteen months. I expect the letter, at the point I hand it to the specific next person who will do this job, to be approximately fifty pages long. I am not going to make it shorter.”

He has told me he began writing the letter in 2019, immediately after he became superintendent.

He has told me he did not, when he became superintendent, know for certain who his eventual replacement would be. He has told me he knew only that, in the specific way of small municipal water utilities, one of the plant’s existing employees would, in some form of internal succession, eventually take the position. He has told me the letter he has been writing is, therefore, addressed simply to: “The Person Who Will Do This After Me.”

He has told me: “I have not, in six years of writing this letter, been able to bring myself to imagine a specific person. I have been writing the letter, instead, to the specific fact of the position. To the specific job. To the specific person who will, whoever they are, be doing this work after I am done.”

He has told me: “This has been, in some way I did not expect, a specific comfort.”

What the other letters have contained

I asked Warren, in our second conversation, about the specific practice at the plant and what it has produced over the twenty-nine years.

He has told me the practice has, over twenty-nine years, produced fourteen letters.

Fourteen — because in the twenty-nine years since Elmer’s letter to Warren, the plant has had fourteen employees retire or leave for other positions. In every one of those fourteen cases, in Warren’s account, the departing employee has written a letter to the specific next person who would do their job.

The letters, in Warren’s careful summary, have varied in length. The shortest, he has told me, was approximately eleven pages. The longest, he has told me, was approximately sixty-eight pages. The average length, in his careful accounting, has been approximately thirty-two pages.

The letters have been written by every category of employee at the plant. Warren has told me he has read — in his role as superintendent — every one of them. He has told me some of them have contained specific technical information about the plant that he has, in his role as superintendent, subsequently used in the plant’s operations. He has told me some of them have contained specific personal information about employees and about the small town the plant serves that has, over the years, become part of the plant’s institutional memory in a way that no other document does.

He has told me the letters are, at the time of this writing, kept in a specific set of files in the plant’s small office. They are kept in the specific way that Elmer kept his letter to Warren: in manila envelopes, in a specific file cabinet, in a specific configuration that has, over the years, become the specific plant’s small institutional archive.

He has told me the plant does not, in the strict sense, own the letters. He has told me each letter is, technically, addressed to a specific individual — the specific next person who will do that job — and that the specific individual, upon receiving the letter, is the specific owner of it. He has told me that in the specific practice of the plant, the recipient of a letter typically keeps the letter for the duration of their own tenure and then, at the end of their tenure, hands the letter to the specific next person along with their own new letter.

He has told me: “The letters, in the specific practice as it has developed, are inherited. Each new employee, on their first day, receives the specific letter that was written to them by the specific person who last held their job. Each departing employee, on their last day, writes their own letter to the specific person who will next hold their job. The letters travel, in the specific way of small institutional inheritances, from one person to the next.”

He has told me: “The plant has, over twenty-nine years, developed what I have come to think of as a specific kind of quiet inheritance system. It is not, in any formal sense, part of the plant’s operations. It is not documented anywhere. It is not required. It is, in the strict sense, entirely voluntary. But every person who has worked at this plant since 1996 has, in their own way, participated in it. And every person who has worked here has, in their own way, benefited from it.”

The younger employees

I asked Warren, in our third conversation, whether the practice has, in the specific way of workplace practices, been sustained by the plant’s more recent hires.

He has told me it has.

He has told me the plant has, in the past ten years, hired four new employees. Each of them, in Warren’s account, has received a letter on their first day. Each of them has, in Warren’s account, been told that when they eventually leave the plant — for retirement or for another position or for whatever reason — they will be expected to write a similar letter for the specific next person.

He has told me that in every one of the four cases, the new employee has, over their first six months at the plant, come to him privately at some point to ask a specific question about the practice. He has told me the specific question has, in every case, been some version of the following.

The question, in Warren’s summary, has been: “I have been reading the letter. I have been thinking about the practice. I would like to ask you whether it is, in the specific sense, weird.”

He has told me he has, in every case, laughed at the question. He has told me he has, in every case, given the same answer.

The answer, in his own careful phrasing, is the following.

He has told me: “It is weird. It is, in the specific sense of what small municipal water plants do in the ordinary course of their operations, weird. It is not something that most water plants have. It is not something that any professional consulting firm would tell you to do. It is not, in the strict sense of workplace best practices, a practice that is recommended by anyone.”

He has told me: “It is also, in my thirty-one years of doing this work, the single most valuable thing about working here.”

He has told me: “I have watched, over thirty-one years, dozens of people at this plant train dozens of other people at this plant. Most of what people teach other people is, in the specific way of workplace training, forgotten within a year. Most of what people know is, in the specific way of long-tenured workers, taken with them when they leave. The letters are the specific way we have found to prevent this from happening. The letters are the specific way we have found to make sure that the specific things a person has learned, in the course of doing a specific job for a specific number of years, do not vanish when the specific person does.”

He has told me: “The letters are also, in a way I did not understand until I began writing my own, the specific way we have found to reflect on what we have done. In the process of writing a letter to your specific replacement, you have to think about what you have, in fact, been doing. You have to think about what you have learned. You have to think about what you would want the specific next person to know. This is, in the ordinary course of a workday at a small municipal water plant, not something that most workers do. It is, however, something that we do here. Because everyone knows that at some point they will have to sit down and write the letter, and they will have to write down everything they have come to know.”

He has told me: “This is, in a way I did not fully understand until Elmer told me it would be, a specific gift.”

What the new hires do

I asked Warren, in our final conversation, whether the new hires — in the specific act of receiving their letters — have understood what they were being given.

He has told me they have.

He has told me the specific most recent new hire — a woman he has told me is named Jennifer, and who joined the plant six months ago as a junior water operator — has told him the following.

She had, in her first week, read the letter she had been given. The letter, according to Warren, was approximately twenty-seven pages long. It had been written by the specific previous junior water operator, who had retired six months before Jennifer joined.

Jennifer had, according to Warren, come into his office in her second week. She had said, in Warren’s account: “I would like to ask you a question about the letter.”

Warren had said: “Go ahead.”

Jennifer had said, in Warren’s account: “I have read it three times. I have taken notes on it. I have started to keep a small file of things it has told me that I want to remember. I have — this is what I want to ask you about — begun, in some way that is not exactly a decision I have made, to think of the specific person who wrote it as the specific person I am now working for.”

She had said, in Warren’s account: “I have not met him. I do not know what he looks like. I do not know where he lives. I know only what he has told me in the letter. And I have found, in the past two weeks, that I am doing my work with the specific idea in mind that he is, in some quiet way, watching how I do it.”

She had said: “Is this normal?”

Warren has told me he had said, in his own account: “It is.”

Warren has told me: “I have watched every one of the new hires, in their first six months, come to this same realization on their own. The specific person who wrote the letter you received becomes, in some specific way you cannot quite articulate, the specific person you are working for. The specific plant becomes the specific place where you are honoring the specific work that person did before you. The specific letter, over years, becomes the specific voice in your head that tells you how to do the job well.”

He has told me: “This is not, in the strict sense, weird. It is, in the specific way of small quiet inheritances, entirely appropriate. It is, I have decided, the specific reason the practice has continued for twenty-nine years.”

What Warren is going to write in his own letter

I asked Warren, in our final conversation, what he plans to include in his own letter to his eventual replacement.

He has told me he is, at the time of this writing, still deciding.

He has told me he has been thinking, in particular, about a specific set of paragraphs that he wants to include at the end of his letter. He has told me he wants to include something that acknowledges, in a specific way, that the practice of writing these letters is the specific most important thing the plant does.

He has told me he wants to include something that says, in effect, the following.

He has told me he wants to say: “If you inherit this position, and if you inherit this letter along with it, I would like you to consider that the specific practice of writing a letter to the specific next person who will do your job is the specific most important part of your job. More important, in the specific ways that matter, than the specific water treatment work. More important than any of the specific technical decisions you will make in the course of doing that work. The specific water treatment work will, in twenty years, be done by a specific successor. The specific technical decisions will be, in twenty years, superseded by other technical decisions. But the specific practice of writing letters — the specific practice of taking care of the specific person who will come after you, in the specific way that Elmer took care of me, and that I have tried to take care of you — is the specific thing that will continue.”

He has told me he wants to say: “I would like you to write your own letter, when it is your time. I would like you to write it long. I would like you to write it slowly. I would like you to write it in the specific belief that the specific person who will read it is, in some way you cannot fully understand yet, worth the time.”

He has told me: “I have not, at this point, finalized this section. I am still working on it.”

He has told me: “It is, I have come to believe, the specific part of the letter that will most matter.”

What this is

I have, in the weeks since I first heard this story, thought about the specific and unusual ways that certain small workplaces, in the specific way of workplaces that have not been formally optimized by any consulting firm, will develop practices that produce a specific quality of work and a specific quality of institutional memory that most large corporate workplaces cannot, with all of their resources, produce. The practice of writing letters to eventual replacements is not, in the strict sense, a scalable practice. It cannot, in any easy way, be implemented at a Fortune 500 company. It cannot be imposed. It cannot be measured. It cannot be optimized.

It can, however, be done. It has, at a small municipal water treatment plant in central Nebraska, been done for twenty-nine years. It has produced, in that time, a specific and rare kind of workplace — a workplace in which every employee, past and present, is understood to be part of a specific ongoing chain of care, and in which the specific act of writing down what you have learned is understood to be as important as anything else you do. (For a related earlier piece on the specific quiet ways that a small group of professionals, given a small unstructured resource, will develop practices that work better than the formal practices they have been given, see the Wattalife story about the fifty-eight employees on a specific floor of a downtown Chicago office building who have turned their designated “wellness space” into a small functioning informal economy over the course of two and a half years.)

Warren told me, at the end of our final conversation, that he had, the previous evening, been working on a specific paragraph of his own letter. The paragraph, he has told me, was a specific paragraph about a specific memory he has of Elmer.

The memory, he has told me, is the following.

Elmer had, in the summer of 1994 — approximately two years before he retired — been showing Warren a specific piece of equipment at the plant. It was, in Warren’s account, a specific old pump that was, at the time, no longer in daily use but that Elmer had wanted Warren to understand. Elmer had, in the course of explaining the specific mechanical behavior of the pump, told Warren something that Warren has never, in the thirty-one years since, forgotten.

Elmer had said, in Warren’s account: “This pump was installed here in 1972. It has been here longer than I have. When I started here, it was already old. When you retire, if the plant is still using this pump, it will still be here. The pump will outlast us both. The specific thing that will outlast us, at a place like this, is not us. The specific thing that will outlast us is the specific work we do while we are here.”

Warren has told me: “I have been thinking, in the past six years, about the specific way in which Elmer was, in that specific moment in 1994, wrong.”

He has told me: “The pump is, in fact, still at the plant. It is still, in the specific sense Elmer described, going to outlast me. But the specific thing that will outlast me at this plant is not, in the strict sense, the pump. It is not, in the strict sense, the specific technical work I have done here.”

He has told me: “The specific thing that will outlast me at this plant is the letter. The specific letter that I am, right now, writing. The specific practice that I am, along with everyone else who has worked here, sustaining. The specific chain of care that has, over twenty-nine years, been passed from one specific person to the next. This is, in the specific way that matters, the specific thing I will leave behind.”

He has told me: “I have decided, in the past six years, that this is enough.”

—

Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, been considering whether there is any specific practice from her own work — the specific work of a small editorial publication — that she should, in her own careful way, begin to document for the specific person who will, at some point, do this work after her. She has decided, tentatively, that there is. She has decided, tentatively, to begin. She has not, at this stage, decided how long the eventual document will be. She suspects, based on the specific way Warren has described his own process, that she will find out only when she is finished.