Note: Earlier versions of this report included images of the participant. A decision was made to remove these portions in the interest of impartiality, though it should be noted he sat for the photos willingly and with such gentle enthusiasm.

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I wouldn’t say it’s an important job. I wouldn’t even say it’s a job that makes much sense at first. I’d describe it more as having the virtue of simplicity, of being relatively easy to do as long as you have the requisite ability to move and lift. It certainly isn’t rewarding in any conventional sense. Beyond the funds deposited into my bank account twice monthly, its larger economic benefit is, to me at least, quite unclear.

Are you from the agency? It doesn’t matter much, it’s just I’ve never met anyone from there. I ripped one of those small pieces of paper from a larger piece of paper on a tall telephone pole.

Well, I … I set my own hours, at least they never gave me any. I was really very comprehensive when I reviewed the employment contract and there was nothing about specific hours. There was a vague section about not being seen. Who by I don’t know but I assumed they meant the general public. I could’ve just assumed that for my own benefit. I prefer to work late at night so I could have made a projection based on my own preference. That they meant the general public that is, that that’s who they meant when they said I must avoid being seen. Yes I’d describe the situation as shadowy, quite shadowy. Though I wouldn’t let something like a shadow get in the way of doing good work.

The idea, more or less, is that I pick them up. Sometimes if they’re somewhere that seems sort of dangerous like the road or in a shopping centre or sometimes they get very near large bodies of water, in that sort of case sometimes I do move them. Never very far, I never move them very far. Oh, I wouldn’t do that. I guess the software they have accounts for a small amount of irregularity. I don’t know, I just assumed they have some sort of software for tracking them; how else would they know I’d completed the job properly? Anyway, I try not to move them much, it’s not like they can get lost or anything, they’re not children. Actually “pick them up” isn’t quite right, I prop them up, I put them back on their stands, that’s more accurate. Yes, so I get them standing again, upright, the whole goal of the thing is to get them upright. Could you strike that I said “pick them up”? They aren’t children … they aren’t crying to be picked up.

Yes, I certainly began to feel a sense of responsibility for them after a while, even if they can’t feel anything, they’ve just been pushed over like that. It’s morbid. They’re just left like that on the ground, exposed. Lambs in the pasture.

No, I know it’s obvious they can’t feel anything. I was just making sure you knew I understood that.

The thing that I expected to really get me down about it is of course the Sisyphean implications. I thought I’d get out ahead of that question. Sorry, I didn’t mean to use a word like that. I don’t like to be so extravagant, but I want to acknowledge that yes, there’s a sickness to the cycle. I just figured you were bound to get to it and I want to say yes, yes, it bothered me at first. You spend an entire night walking around putting them back in their proper place, taking care of them really … and then on your way home you see just as many that have been pushed over again. It needled at me, of course it did. But then eventually I sort of realised that it’s in their nature to fall like that, that it’s this sort of a beautiful thing. Very natural. That it’s the way it has to be. We need nurses just as much as we need accidents. The nurses and the accidents, they soothe each other, at the very least there’s begrudging respect, they’re colleagues. Well, it’s the same for me. I’m right in the heady muck of symbiosis.

I say let flesh caress metal. Make it syrupy. They can’t stand up for themselves, I have to lend a hand. Yes, that’s correct, I like that about the job.

I know I said it isn’t an important job, I’d like to clarify that. I was speaking from a business perspective, not a personal one. If you’d like to get into my views from a perspective of profitability, I’d be glad to. I can be very professional. I can separate my own feelings. I can be barbarous.

Yes, rain can be difficult. I don’t receive additional compensation during harsh weather. It gets very cold, bitterly cold. I used to get quite concerned about my hands fusing to their haunches, like horrible wolves whose tongues get stuck to cold metal telephone poles. I think I saw that in a cartoon once. I remember the sound when he eventually ripped it off, like velcro but with capillaries.

I won’t deny that it’s a cosmetic pursuit, that it’s all in the name of visual continuity. But I also want to say that they’re each different, they have identifiable characteristics. Some of them shine and some of them don’t. They have distinguishable ways of falling, of lying there. Some have a gruffness, you know, your Brando types. They bear down into the earth more than others. I can tell the dirt coats them better, that it clings to them, that they encourage the grass to snap under their weight. Some are lighter, they’re silky. They creep very sweetly onto the ground. I don’t like to think of the ones that are inclined toward the ground; I believe that to be a perverted inclination. No, I wouldn’t say I’m particularly morally prescriptive … I believe in fortitude, I believe there are consequences.

You know it’s a job that has to be done, or at least it is being done. I’m doing it. And because I’m being paid, although meagrely, I assume it matters to someone else. It has to be a bonafide service. It bothers me when I see them tangled on the ground like that, so I assume it concerns others. Everything has a correct mode, a proper natural state; I’ve come to know this better. I can feel the outline of it and just as much, I can feel when it’s disturbed. When they collapse, when they find themselves on top of each other, grazing their hides on each other’s bolts, it isn’t right. They need space between them; they need an orbit of their own. It doesn’t do for them to be mangled. It doesn’t look right, but beyond that, it doesn’t feel right. I can sense it when I first come upon a hoard, strewn, lying this way and that. I can feel it isn’t the way their bodies really should be, that it’s an aberration of some kind.

To be frank … I do get the sense that it matters, that I’m helping them. I can’t shake the feeling of charity when I hold them. Sometimes I lick a finger and wipe away a smudge of dirt like they’re mine. Like I’m about to send them off, apple slices and thermoses of hot milk in hand, to a very good school.

No, like I said, I understand they aren’t children.

Upon learning that the conditions for this study had been manufactured, the participant submitted the following letter. Assumptions can be made based on its clarity and tenor that future studies should engage with a more considered approach to the implications for a subject’s ongoing wellbeing.