Except for working for the government …, I don’t think I ever worked anywhere where I was caught in a trap. I know someone who worked in a Navy office, this huge office with little compartments made with filing cabinets. And she shuffled papers all day long, and she thought it was useless, and not much good to anybody, and she put some papers in the wrong file once, and a sailor’s records ended up in the office for dead people. He was still alive, and I used to worry about it. Kept asking, “Did you ever tell anybody you did it? Did you ever try to get them back?” She said, “No, I didn’t want to.” And I’ve often thought about that poor sailor and wondered where he is now? If he was officially dead as far as the records were concerned, did he ever get to come back, get a resurrection? But she felt that she’d cause more damage by admitting that she had accidentally killed someone off, than by just letting it go. She said, “I’m going to get out and I’ll never find out.”
Allan Sekula, Aerospace Folktales [1973], in Photography Against the Grain. Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 158.