Never a score.

Nobody is sorted. Inside a family of machine the names sit in no order at all: there is no first place, no last place and nothing in between, because nothing sorts them. Nobody can pay to sit at the head of a list, because there is no head to sit at.

You are asked for by name, by people who have seen you work. That is the same thing that has always happened at the yard gate. All that is different here is that it gets written down, and that the person who was asked for gets paid.

• Nothing rates a way of working, and no rating sits beside a name.
• Nothing compares this month against last month, or this year against your first one.
• Nothing charts you against anybody else running the same family of machine.
• There is no field anywhere for an owner's, a customer's or a supervisor's opinion of you.

That last one is worth saying properly. It is not that such a field is left empty as a matter of good manners — there is nowhere for one to be written. A policy of not writing it down can be reversed in an afternoon by somebody who never met you. Having nowhere to write it cannot.

No summary lands on a manager's desk at the end of the month. No screen shows a supervisor how you are getting on. No company can write in and ask us for a read on a person and get one back, and there is nothing here to send them even if somebody wanted to.

And here is why it is built that way rather than merely promised. On wet, soft or blind ground, every measure you could rank people by, turns on you. The careful one works slower, corrects more, and comes out of the figures looking like the worse hand — right up until the quick one is in the ditch. A list sorted on any of that puts the wrong name at the top. So there is no top, and no list to be at the top of.

The number on the plate does one job. It lets the list find one way of working and not another, and it lets a mistyped one be caught before anybody goes looking. That is the whole of it.

The name is what carries the meaning, and the number sits beside it so a system can keep the names straight. It never stands in for you.

No day in a seat has been recorded and nobody is on the list, so there is no record of anybody that could be handed to anybody. Every refusal on this page is written down before there is a single thing to refuse. That is the order it has to happen in: a rule written after the first request arrives is not a rule, it is a decision, and decisions go the way the money goes.