The hours.

Before the work starts, a person on that crew picks whose way of working runs. They pick it by name, and they put their own name on the pick.

There is no default and no last-used. Nothing loads itself, nothing carries over from yesterday, and nothing is running because somebody forgot to turn it off. If nobody picks, nothing of yours is in use and nothing is being counted.

The same pick is what clears the machine to get on with the work. So the act that says go and the act that starts the clock are not two acts, one of them done later by an office. They are one act, done by a named person on the site, at the time.

That is the whole point of doing it that way. Two separate acts can drift apart: the clearance says one thing and the billing says another, and by the time anybody notices, both sides are arguing about a number instead of reading a record. One act cannot drift from itself.

What that pick writes is one row, and it is signed as it is written. The row carries who picked it, which way of working they picked, the job, and the hours it ran.

It matters because it takes away the place where a number usually goes wrong. Where two sets of figures are kept, somebody has to reconcile them, and whoever holds the pen decides which one wins. Here there is one row and no pen.

Check the count at source.

You do not have to take a figure on trust, and you do not have to ask anybody's permission to see it. The row is there and you can go and read it: the same row, from the same place, that the company paying reads.

Being able to see that you were paid is not the same thing as being able to see that you were paid right. Anybody can send you a number and a total at the bottom. The reason the row can be read from both ends — by the outfit being billed and by the person being paid — is so the second question has an answer too, and so it has one without you having to ask a soul for it.

If a line cannot be followed back to a pick with a name on it, it does not get quietly rounded off or dropped. It gets set aside and named, with the reason, until somebody sorts it out.

• Counted: the hours your way of working is in use on somebody else's machine.
• Not counted: the hours you worked. This is not a timesheet and it is not a wage.
• Never in it: how the job went. Nothing in the count moves with whether the day was a good one, because nothing here judges the day.

It earns on days you are nowhere near that machine, and it keeps earning while you are doing something else entirely. That is the part that is worth sitting with, because it is the part that is different from every hour you have ever been paid for.

What an hour is worth to you is written on your paper with Even Steven, in one place, so you read it there and check there that it has not moved. This page does not repeat it and no page on this site carries it. We do not set it either.

If anyone ever quotes you a figure and says it came from Tacit Tessera, it did not. Take the question to Even Steven, where the number actually lives.

No day in a seat has been recorded. No way of working has been picked on any machine. No hour has been counted and nobody has been paid. What is on this page is how the counting is built to run, written down before it runs, so you can read it first and hold us to it afterwards.