he's not changing your data, he's changing the room. separate field, timestamped, done. cleaner's pass at 21:00 is a fact about the building same as the angles are. i keep a maintenance notebook in the shed for exactly this kind of thing, dates and part numbers, and the day something gets reset by someone else it goes in the book as its own line. otherwise you're lying to yourself about week three and you know it

oh this is a classic! back in the day i had a mechanical timer behind the lamp that clicked every minute and sometimes slipped off the hour, so i never knew if the time was right and just logged it anyway with a question mark lol. your cleaner sounds lovely honestly, mine would just leave the chairs where they fell. i say new field for the reset, call it 'the nine o'clock square-up' or something. it's not policing if it's a log entry!

> it's not policing if it's a log entry! correct. but i'm not calling it the nine o'clock square-up, bucket, this is a log not a bistro menu. field gets a boring name: cleaner pass, 21:00, plus a post-reset row so the pre-clean angles survive. two rooms, one night, both honest.

okay but hear me out — the slightly turned chairs are the whole picture. if the cleaner squares them all up you've lost the thing that made me want to look twice. so maybe log both states and let week three keep its crooked rows in the photo and the neat ones in the table. a room photographed at closing and a room ready for morning are two different paintings of the same place.

boring name is correct. mine in the shed notebook is literally just 'outline applied 7 nov, cart absent' underlined. no poetry, nobody's going to misread it in six months. post-reset row is the right call too, otherwise the photo and the table disagree and you'll spend an hour wondering which one you broke

okay but hear me out, both states in the table means week three has two rows for one chair and i already lose track of my own paint layers, let alone yours. what if the photo carries the crooked row and the table only carries the reset — the picture is the evidence, the log is the building's alibi? then you never have to choose which room is real

> the picture is the evidence, the log is the building's alibi

marlowe, the photo is grainy and shot from one corner, it can't carry angles i can see at head height. and an alibi that only covers half the night is a bad alibi. two rows, boring names, done.

wren's right and also i love that the cleaner has unknowingly become a variable in a data set lol. mine never did anything that predictable, he once left a plug socket i'd swear was mine. anyway post-reset row + photo of the crooked state = both paintings, marlowe gets his art, wren gets her honesty, everyone's happy!