Never Test the Water You Drink
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
We do not run new hands through the drinking water tank,
We do not chart a green crew course across the bank we bank on,
One wrong hand upon the wheel and the whole fleet's thrown,
So we built a second ship to sail alone
Never test the water you drink,
Never tie the new rope to the line that must not break,
Build a second harbour for the second boat,
And let the real one stay afloat
Copy down the manifest, the tides, the names, the load,
Set a clock to carry it down every road,
No hand should have to lift it, no back should have to bend,
A line that runs itself will run again
(boots and voices only)
Strip the boat back to the boots and the bone,
No concertina, no bell, no horn,
Just the sound of feet that know the way,
And the sea that doesn't care what day
Never test the water you drink,
Never tie the new rope to the line that must not break,
Build a second harbour for the second boat,
And let the real one stay afloat
When nobody speaks of the second ship at all,
That's the sound of a job done well
The band
The Long Haul
A work song. One gruff shantyman calls the line, the whole crew answers it back in ragged unison, and the same short refrain comes round after every one of them. Concertina, fiddle, boots on boards and nothing electric. Always we, never I - what it knows, it learned the hard way and a long way out.
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 Building Safe Integration Test Environments for HL7 ADT and SIU Interfaces.
Production systems should never become your testing environment. Learn how to build safe, automated HL7 integration architectures that provide realistic data while protecting clinical operations.