Somebody Else's Locknew
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Moved my ledgers in a house where the rent come cheap and kind
Yeah, I moved my ledgers in a house where the rent come cheap and kind
Got my own key, got my own door, but that lock was fitted 'fore my time
That lock holds seven days, then the river rolls it out to sea
I said that lock holds seven days, then the river rolls it out to sea
Good for fixin' Friday's mess, but the law wants last year back from me
Somebody else's lock, somebody else's clock
Somebody picked that number 'fore my records hit the dock
Green tick in the window swears I'm covered safe and sound
Covered by a promise made for somebody else's ground
Somebody else's lock, somebody else's clock
Somebody picked that number 'fore my records hit the dock
Green tick in the window swears I'm covered safe and sound
Covered by a promise made for somebody else's ground
Eight months on, collector knockin', wants a paper from the spring
River took it, vault is empty, and nobody changed a thing
But forever ain't no safe bet, more copies, more doors to pick
Choose your number with a reason, sign your name and make it stick
If one tenant needs the years, the whole house carries the bill
Ask before the first line's written, or the collector will
The band
The Technical Debt Collectors
A gravelly, swaggering voice calling out over a band that struts. Twelve-bar phrasing with a repeated opening line, and a lyric that is all debt, interest, collection and somebody eventually paying.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post A New Database Inherits Someone Else's Retention Decision.
When a new database lands on a shared instance, it quietly inherits the backup retention someone else chose, so the retention question has to be asked on purpose.