0.5mm hook, a 70-year-old farmhouse, and the cost of the workaround

Living in a 70+ year old farmhouse that has never been renovated has its pros and cons (okay… sometimes several cons.) While dealing with a routine plumbing issue, we found out that some of our main piping was still the original orangeburg pipe. Unbeknownst to us, it had been quietly degrading while we lived normally on top of it.

If you've never heard of it, orangeburg pipe is made of a compressed tar paper. It was a wartime workaround that got baked into everyday construction before PVC became the standard because it was cheap and available. Downside, it degrades from the inside out. It doesn't drip or announce itself as it breaks down. It just quietly softens and, eventually, collapses.

Nobody did anything wrong. It was always going to fail. The only unknown was when.

And this doesn’t only happen with homes. Most of us have operational infrastructure that works like orangeburg pipe: systems that were built with what was available at the time, workflows we patched because patching was faster than rebuilding, and processes we work around so smoothly we’ve mostly stopped noticing the workaround.

And we treat “not fixing it yet” as the low-cost option.

It isn’t. (Unfortunately.)

I've started calling it the workaround carrying cost. The idea that deferring a fix doesn't eliminate the cost. It just converts the lump-sum repair into a recurring subscription you pay in smaller installments. Things like: time, attention, energy, data silos, and manual steps that feel more like breathing than extra work. The fragility that quietly compounds every time you build something new on a foundation that was always supposed to be temporary.

You're not saving the cost of the fix. You're paying interest on it, indefinitely, in amounts small enough that you never feel the full weight all at once.

And even as someone who works with clients to create the systems and processes that make their work transferable, scalable, and sustainable, I’m guilty of this too.

I have my own undocumented processes. Several of them, actually.

I both know better and also haven't done it. If you need permission to admit you have your own orangeburg pipe, I hope it helps to know I do it too.

I'm not the only data point. I’ve worked in corporate teams and with clients who’ve faced a significant structural infrastructure question at some point. In start-up culture, and especially bootstrapped businesses, the workaround is usually the choice the first time around. It’s faster, makes sense at the time, and buys room to focus on what actually mattered that quarter. But those things always surface again, whether it takes 3 months or 3 years. Except it’s often showing back up when complexity is higher, the stakes are bigger, and the cost to actually fix it has compounded right along with everything that got built around it.

Because: it was always going to fail. The only unknown was when.

And there’s nuance to this like everything.

Sometimes it is a passive choice. By not choosing intentionally, it becomes the decision by default. But sometimes circumstances like cash flow, and capacity don’t allow for a different option. The choice is intentional. We accept the cost and purposefully procrastinate betting on the next go around being better equipped to handle the solve.

You're not failing for having orangeburg pipes in your business. Most people do. The construction decisions made when things were new and fast-moving and just trying to survive often look like them when you dig them up later.

You don't have to fix it. Today, we’re just naming it and building awareness.