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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> records show the city did not turn the fountain on until April 2000

This is the kind of thing you pay defence lawyers for... I mean, I wouldn't even expect the city to keep records of when the fountain was switched on 20 years ago, let alone be able to get hold of them! And imagine you went to all that effort only to be told "yeah, they were turned on in march that year"...

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That's exactly the kind of thing a parks or utilities department would keep track of, since it bears heavily on staffing schedules, maintenance, cleaning, budget, etc.

And exactly the reason why archiving is so important, even though the process and data stored seems trivial and wasteful.

Mind you there's plenty of archiving still going on, but it's personal / behavioural data.

I could totally imagine there being a team of ~8 people responsible for a few parks. Each day, the foreman decides what to work on (cutting trees, weeding, cleaning the pond, picking litter, repainting railings, etc.). The filling of the fountain might not be planned/scheduled, but simply because the forman saw the sun was out and decided today is the day to switch it on.

For that kind of team, there isn't much need to keep paper records.

Considering that the defence lawyers are representing a real estate company this isn't entirely surprising. The firm would be looking up such records every day.

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