Read a week of dispatch sheets before you draw a single line

On the first morning of an operations mapping study we do not unroll paper. We sit with the copies. A week’s dispatch list from a Tbilisi yard is a stack of short lines: truck, driver, destination, a time that may be a hope. The waybills, if they were kept, are kinder. They name the consignee. They sometimes name a wait.

We look first for runs that appear in the briefing and not in the paper. Those are the ghost corridors — the ‘we always do Kakheti on Thursday’ that Thursday’s book does not support. We look second for empty returns recorded as if they were loaded, which inflates a catchment overnight. We look third for subcontracted legs that left no copy. Those become holes. We label holes. We do not colour them in from memory.

Only after that reading do we ask for a gate morning. The gate will contradict the paper in small ways: a trailer that left at five although the sheet says seven, a wait the book never named. Those contradictions are the drawing. If you skip the paper and go straight to a handsome line from capital to port, you will hang a poster, not a study.