Tribal knowledge, what is it?

It’s things in your head now that you haven’t written down because you are reading this. It is the issue you resolved quickly yesterday that you told yourself, “That’s taken care of, no one will need to do that again”. It is the description that you didn’t enter when you closed the ticket out. It is the resolution decided in a hallway meeting. It is the received email that uses improper nouns referring to that things only you would know about. It is that workaround that was so ingenuously constructed that only the creator knows how it operates. It is also, that clattering noise indicating that something is wrong that only you can recognize because you’ve listened for 4,745 days and never heard it before. It is the patterns of those around you as well as the meanings of those patterns. It is the oops, that could have been prevented if there had just been “prior knowledge”. It is the files that are trashed because they are “no longer needed”. It is the information you wished you had, but can’t read, buy, steal, or quickly glean from those around you. It is the false alarm, that you know is a false alarm and not something to be worried about. It is that port on the panel, that did that weird thing once. It is the meta that is never archived. It is the thing, that without it, will makes you feel like it is your first day. It is why you recreate the wheel. It is the knowledge, that if you had now, would probably keep you from trying to improve things. It is the weight the bears down upon those who haven’t shared their knowledge and cages them in. It is the thought you had last week about the repair that you told so-and-so about that was never confirmed. It is the undocumented day-to-day, and the oil our business machines cannot function without.