The map that kept travelling

Some years ago a student in Alexandria drew a map of the city's microbus routes: where each one starts, where it leaves the Corniche, which hand signal makes it stop. He photocopied it for friends who kept getting lost, posted a scan online, and went back to his exams.

He did not think about it again for a long time. It was never famous. Nobody wrote about it.

But it travelled. A cousin printed it for a family moving up from the south. A volunteer used it to help newcomers reach work on the other side of town. The scan still circulates, faded, with routes added in other people's handwriting. Somebody reached a job interview on time because of it. Somebody else learned the city faster than they had feared, and stayed.

When we make something, we tend to judge it by the next few weeks. Did people notice? Did it spread? Was it a hit? The honest answer is often no, and we file the thing away as minor.

That verdict comes far too early. Work outlives the moment it was made in, and it keeps doing things after its maker has moved on. It opens a door for someone you will never meet, who then opens one for somebody else.

It does not need to reach everyone to count. Most of what holds a city, a market or a culture together is a pile of small useful things that a few people relied on for a long time.

The question worth asking at the start is not whether this will be big. It is whether it will still be of use to someone in twenty years.