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Short abstract:

The paper historicize the concept of maintaining analyzing how Swiss PTT workers perceived themselves. It uses as a main source "Union PTT", the weekly magazine of the PTT workers' union, and outlines an interesting finding: even maintainers did not perceive themselves as maintainers.

Long abstract:

From 1927 to 1959, from the creation of the state company (PTT) to the fulfillment of the first completely automatic network in the world, the Swiss telephone infrastructure experienced a rapid development (Kronig, 2011).

This technological update was accompanied with daily activities of maintenance, essential to keep the service in function. Recent literature stressed how maintenance and repair are generally overlooked (Russel & Vinsel, 2020); Swiss telephony is no exception. Maintenance activities produced few information and technical documents, now stored at the PTT-Archiv (Köniz, Bern). The paper historicize the concept of maintaining (Krebs & Weber, 2021) analyzing how PTT workers perceived themselves; it uses as a main source "Union PTT", the weekly magazine of the PTT workers' union, and outlines an interesting finding: even maintainers did not perceive themselves as maintainers.

In Union PTT, articles on maintenance are rare. The general lack of interest affected the self-representation of people that worked to “the main means by which the constant decay of the world is held off” (Graham & Thrift, 2007). These workers preferred to discuss other activities and consider themselves as innovators, instead of maintainers.

As a conclusion, the paper investigates the “very specific relationships” (Denis & Pontille, 2019) of these workers with the technological infrastructure. Their day-to-day “form-keeping” business was scarcely considered in a way that can be described, in Freudian terms, through the concept of “undoing”; on the other hand, they considered crucial their professional training, to be part of the innovative “form-giving” process held by their company.