The roof is not his job

On a building in Aswan, a pipe on the roof has been dripping for a week. The watchman at the gate has seen it. When a resident mentions it, he says the roof is not his job. He looks after the door.

He is not wrong, and that is the trouble. Most of us were rewarded for years for doing what was asked and nothing beyond it. Find the edge of the instructions, stay inside it, and keep an eye on what everyone around you is doing. Nobody can fault you for following the rules, or for doing what the person next to you did.

That is why it is so attractive. Going along pays immediately. It feels safer, and in a narrow way it is. In the middle of a crowd you are hard to pick out. You also cannot see much from there.

The alternative is usually described as freedom, which is not quite it. The alternative is responsibility: noticing that something is going wrong and deciding it is yours to deal with, even though nobody handed it to you. Caring slightly more than the job requires. Speaking up when silence was allowed.

None of this depends on where you sit. The watchman can climb the stairs and knock on the door of the one tenant who knows a plumber. To the family whose ceiling stays dry, his title is irrelevant. What counts is that he saw the leak and chose to own it.

The habit of going along did not grow by itself. Somebody benefits from people who stay inside the lines, and it is rarely the person who gets wet.

A useful first question, then, before the next shrug: who exactly is gaining from my staying quiet?