They say those that can not do, teach. And while that might hold true in a lot of places, here at Starfleet we have a dedicated career path for such individuals – inspectors. Now look, I can understand that nobody wants to live and work on board a space station or starship assembled and maintained with the level of care you might expect to find from a midshipman’s practical exam portion. But the number of people that you’re actually going to find in this service who are lazy or incompetent, is next to zero. Things degrade over time, that is a reality of life, though a loose screw or improperly affixed panel – that is just not something you are going to find making its way out of space dock.

Starfleet has all these rules and regulations for just about every possible thing you could imagine. There are entire courses dedicated to the threading on bolts and the different types of braids for wires. I’m sure the galley has entire padds full of just different ways to prepare eggs for breakfast. We all learn an avalanche of these little ways to do things at the academy. And those things are always floating around in the back of your mind, silently guiding you as you go about your duties. But despite the best attempts of bureaucracy’s finest manual writers, there are just some things you learn and pick up over the years that can’t be written down.

Anyone that has worked in any department for a length of time has developed their own techniques and in-house solutions for application in their areas of expertise. You start out adhering to the guidelines one for one, but slowly you start throwing in your own twists. Sometimes these can be something as small and inconsequential as the order you prefer to tighten fasteners – it doesn’t make a different for the end result, but for you it just feels better, more right. Same goes for how you store and organize your tools. There are volumes upon volumes of literature on efficient and effective tool storage, that will tell you with no discernible uncertainty that this is the only way. And yet, somehow everyone ends up with their tools arranged following their own system of rules. You can be suggested where you should put it, but it always ends up going where you need it.

And this is just on a personal scale of doing business in space. Once you expand the scope to teams, coworkers, and inter-departmental juggling acts, all the small little preferences have snowballed into their very own localized culture. And as much as it would pain high command to accept, these pockets of micro cultures are what keep everything running smoothly and the gears of the fleet machine turning. They don’t want to hear about the system of hover dollys and porters who ferry machine parts and materials across seven decks using a four different colors of bins with a custom set of symbols that look straight out of xeno-linguists. Admiral Pippington just knows that when he requests his ribeye and baked potato from the replicator, that it appears moments later in a cloud of sparkles and steam.

But that isn’t true of the inspectors. They’ll follow every single pipe, wire, and conduit leading to that replicator back to it’s source. These folks will crawl under desks, rip panels off, play chutes and ladders through a maze of jefferies tubes, the whole works. And they won’t stop until they’re satisfied with every atom of engineering encountered along the way is a perfect match to their favorite encyclopedia of correctness. And if something is out of the ordinary, if it deviates even a thousandth from the norm – well, let’s just say you better be able to point to the exact matter-anti-matter tank where those cow particles for the ribeye are grazing.

Now I just transferred onto this station. I’m still not fully unpacked and put away. I’ve been sticking things where ever they fit or I think they look nice. I want to feel at home and comfortable in my workspace – after all, this is where the vast majority of my time is spent, and I would rather be at ease while I work rather than feeling like a lab tribble in a sterile observation tank. I like my plants, I like my posters, I like my spiral galaxy of paperwork organizing system. And I know where everything is. And because it’s so cozy in here, I’d be smiling while finding something you asked for. There is an old Earth saying: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what is an empty desk a sign of.” Who ever wrote that one, they got things done.

But the inspectors, they don’t appreciate this philosophy. They follow their own system of belief, and their good book is full of subsections, subordinate paragraphs, and dangling asides. And they show up with every tool you could ever imagine, plus one hundred more. They have tools to measure the accuracy and operational quality of other tools. Environmental sensor suites they have to push around on hover carts to measure workplace moisture levels and oxygen concentration for ideal alertness and productivity. There are more tools in their kit to do things a tool should never have been invented for in the first place, than there are actual tools! The folks are the royalty of accessorizing.

But goodness forbid if part of my everyday carry is a coffee mug, and an arc light spanner with a bolty sticker on it. Suddenly there is no place for extra tools and items. Suddenly we need to cut back on the clutter. They don’t realize that without my comfort items and cup of joe, I’d be asleep in my quarters right now enjoying a lovely dream about Colludian sunsets. They wouldn’t even know they were inspecting an office, and would probably think it was an old disused storage closet. And perhaps, that’s the better way. Because for being the team that makes sure everything is running and working, nothing grinds station productivity to a halt like every crew member running around dusting and straightening things on shelves.

One of these days I’d like to go on a little exploratory mission to the administration wing, and see how things are looking in the inspectors bureau. It want to know if it’s all spotless and sparkling, not a single misplaced tricorder or unaccounted for coat rack. If the deuterium panels really are shinier on the other side. Or if like everyone else on this station, they’ve fallen into their own habits. If their office has developed it’s own localized culture. Or if in their obsession over the quality of other people’s work and spaces has detracted from their attention to maintaining a high standard for their own. Every department is unique, and as career counseling will tell you, there are a lot of departments. But for all their individuality, they still have one thing in common across them all. People.

There is not enough quantumly compressed bio electric storage in all of Starfleets computer systems to account for all the factors of individual people. And so I suspect, that if you zipped up the turbolift and stepped into their offices, you wouldn’t make it past the lobby before spotting multiple things out of place. And now that I think about it, this might actually be a great idea. If the presence of the inspectors on the work areas grinds all work to a halt, perhaps the presence of crew members in the inspection office would grind all the inspections to a halt…

Hmm. Write that down!