Reliability is the easy half of the ISTJ description. The hard half is what the reliability is made of, and why the people standing next to it read it, so reliably, as a ceiling.
For six years I told people that Otto Bergquist could not improvise, and for most of that time I thought I was being fond about it.
I had material. In my second week at Aldag Organ Works I carried in a windchest that wouldn’t hold its pressure, and Otto set it on the bench and did not look at it. He went to the shelf, took down the service book for that instrument, and read for four minutes while I stood there with my hands wet. Then he came back, put his thumb on a seam under the toe board, and it was that seam.
“How’d you know?”
“Second time,” he said.
“You remember it?”
“It’s written down.”
I was twenty-three. I had come out of a two-year program in Chicago expecting to build new instruments, and I had landed in a converted knitting mill outside Neenah where four jobs in five were other people’s organs, forty and eighty and a hundred years old, coming apart in ways nobody had planned for. Otto was fifty-five and had been the voicer at Aldag since 1979. A voicer is the person who makes a pipe speak. You set the toe, you file the languid, you nick it if it wants nicking, you listen, and then you do it again eleven hundred more times until the whole rank agrees with itself. It is the last job in a shop that can’t be made faster by wanting it faster.
By that first December I had the routine down. I could do the version of Otto that landed at a bar: the ring binder he carried onto every job site, the twenty minutes he took at noon to drive home and eat, the day-long gap between a question and its answer, the way he said has that been tried the way you’d ask somebody for the time. Anybody who has worked a trade has an Otto, and they laugh in the right place, and you never have to explain a thing.
The shop ran on paper. Every instrument we touched had a folder, and inside the folder was a sheet for each division of the organ, and on the sheet was every rank, its maker, its pitch, its wind pressure, and a column of dates going back to whenever somebody first started keeping the folder. When you finished a piece of work you put your initials in the margin next to the line. Everybody did it. It took a second.
In my third week Otto handed me a pen and stood there.
“What are you telling me when you put your letters on a sheet?”
“That I did the work.”
“That you looked,” he said, and went back to the bench.
I wrote NC in eleven margins that morning. I had looked at seven of them.
The four letters arrived in October of my first year, in a hotel bar in Cincinnati during the builders’ convention, at the end of a table of people I didn’t know. A woman four seats down was describing her shop’s foreman, who sounded like Otto in the way that everybody’s foreman is somebody’s Otto, and then she said, “He’s an ISTJ, it isn’t his fault,” and three people made the same noise at once.
I knew the shape of what she meant without knowing what she’d said. I did not look it up. I’d like to be accurate about why, because I have heard myself give the flattering version. It would have taken forty seconds on my phone under the table. I already had what I wanted out of the sentence, which was the feeling of Otto being a known quantity that other people also knew.
I called my mother from the room that night and did the bit about the binder, and she laughed in the right place.
ISTJ vs ISFJ: Two People Who Remember Everything
The mill made stockings from 1904 until 1948, then bandages for a war, then nothing, and Aldag bought it in 1961 for the ceiling height. The erecting floor is fifty-two feet clear under the trusses, which is what you need if you want to stand an organ up whole and hear it before you take it apart and ship it. There are bolt holes in that floor in rows, four hundred of them, where the knitting frames sat. In August the wood swells and closes them a little and in February they open back up. Somebody scratched ANNA H into a pane in the west clerestory with a diamond, and nobody has washed that window since I’ve been there, on the theory that you’d have to touch it.
Lorraine Pfaff had done the leather at Aldag since 1988. Pouches, gussets, primaries, secondaries, the whole soft interior of a windchest, which is where instruments actually die. She sewed at a table under the north windows with a radio going and she could tell you which organ a scrap of leather had come off of.
In February of my third year Mrs. Kadlec called from St. Wenceslaus in Kaukauna to say the organ was wrong. She could not say how. It was wrong.
Otto took the call standing up, said about nine words, hung up, and went to the folder. He came back to the bench with the tuning log and read it, and then read the one under it. Then he called the parish office and asked what time the furnace came on, and then he asked what time it had come on in 2009, and the woman in the office found somebody who knew. In November the parish had moved the furnace start from five in the morning to seven-thirty to save gas. He wrote Mrs. Kadlec a letter with four numbers in it: the temperature in the room the last time the instrument was tuned, the temperature in the room at nine-fifteen on a Sunday now, the pitch difference that produces, and what it would cost to tune it to the new schedule.
Lorraine drove out. She didn’t tell anybody she was going. She came back at four with a report that had no numbers in it at all. Mr. Kadlec had died in March. Mrs. Kadlec was playing the eight-thirty now instead of the ten-thirty, because the eight-thirty was the service he had never come to and she could get through it. And sometime during Advent two men had walked the console eighteen inches back to make room for the crèche and had not walked it forward again, so she was sitting outside the shadow of the pipes and hearing the room instead of the instrument.
Both of them were right. There were two problems.
I have thought about that Tuesday more than any other day I worked there. The easy reading, and the one I took at the time, is that Lorraine was a warm person and Otto was a cold one. The harder reading took me another five years. Both of them did the same thing that morning. Each of them had a filed, dated, physical record of St. Wenceslaus going back decades; each checked what they were being told against it; each found the place where the present had come off the record. Otto’s record was of the instrument. Lorraine’s was of the parish. She knew the year of the crèche and the year of the wedding and what the last organist’s hands had been like at the end. That is a filing system. It is kept the same way and consulted the same way, and the difference is in what somebody decided was worth filing.
The next week Lorraine drove back out with Dale and the two of them shouldered the console forward and shimmed it. She never sent an invoice for the trip and Roz never asked her for one.
ISTJ Strengths and Weaknesses: Nobody Has Had One for Ten Years
Roz Aldag ran the company. She took it from her father in 2004, and she sold work by getting a building committee to see a thing that did not exist yet, in a room where the thing that did exist was making a noise like a bus. Roz was organized in a way that had no paper in it. She kept the whole firm in her head, live, all of it, and the head was enormous. What she kept was what people wanted. In 2016 she could tell you what the chair of a committee in Manitowoc had said he was afraid of in 2011. What she couldn’t always tell you was what she had put in writing on the way to giving it to him.
The gray came back from the 2010 convention, two years before I got there. A supply house out of Ohio had a synthetic to replace pouch leather: cheaper, dimensionally stable, no tanning variation, and the literature claimed the equivalent of twenty years of accelerated aging. Otto asked one question about it, which I have now heard four people repeat and which I believe is verbatim.
“Who’s had one for ten years?”
Nobody had. The material had been on the market three years. There was no organ anywhere with that stuff in it that had been through ten Februaries in a room where somebody turns the boiler off on Monday.
Roz specified it anyway, on three jobs: Sacred Heart in Appleton in 2011, St. Boniface in Manitowoc in 2012, Immanuel in Sheboygan in 2013. It took about nine thousand dollars off a job. In 2011 nine thousand dollars was the difference between four jobs and two.
Here is where the description of this type gets printed as a virtue and lived as a problem. Everything written about the ISTJ leads with reliability, and reliability is real, and it is also the least interesting thing in the room. What Otto actually supplied to that shop was a floor under its claims: he would not say a thing had been checked unless it had been checked by somebody, in a way that left a mark on paper. And the cost of that, day to day, was that he would not help you get past the place where the checking ran out. He wouldn’t argue chemistry with a salesman. He wouldn’t take it to the board. He would just decline to be attached to it, and then go back to the bench, and let the rest of us work out what to do with a no that came with no plan behind it.
I was there for the third job. Immanuel’s substitution sheet came around on a Thursday in March, and Roz needed a signature from production. Otto read it standing up and set it back down on the table.
“You’ve never had it in your hands,” Roz said.
“That’s right.”
“It’s a supply house, Otto. They’ve got a lab.”
“Mm.”
“Somebody has to sign it.”
He put the cap back on his pen. “Then not me.”
I signed it. It was twenty to eleven in the morning, I was twenty-four, and there were nine other sheets under it.
ISTJ at Work: The Second Week of July
Sacred Heart called in February of 2018 about a note that wouldn’t stop. Then it was eleven notes. By April we knew: the gray had gone brittle at the fold, all through the instrument, everywhere the pouch has to breathe. Seven years.
I should say that July was also the starlings. A hailstorm in June took out a clerestory pane on the north side and a pair got in and built in the top of a scaffold tower in the erecting room, and you cannot run a nest out of a fifty-two-foot room with a broom. Dale built a plywood ramp up to the broken pane that no bird ever used. Lorraine put a pie tin of water on the scaffold deck and got told off by Roz for going up the ladder in July at sixty-six. For two weeks everybody in that building worked around four birds and complained about it constantly and did nothing whatsoever about it, and then one day they were gone and nobody had been watching when it happened.
The meeting was on the twenty-second, in the old front office, the one with the radiator that bangs. Roz, Otto, me, and a woman named Pyle from the firm the insurer sent.
Pyle had the Immanuel substitution sheet in a folder with a bar code on it. My initials were in the margin.
Otto had the binder. He read out the 2010 entry, which had the supply house, the claim, and his question in it, and then the entry from March of 2013, which had Roz’s instruction in it with the date and the time of day. Roz said, honestly, that she didn’t remember the sheet, and I believe she didn’t.
Pyle turned to me. “When you initialed this, did you know the material had no field history?”
“No.”
“Did anyone tell you?”
“No.”
That was the whole of my part. It took about forty seconds.
At the end, while Pyle was putting things back in the folder, Otto opened the binder flat on his knee and wrote in it, four or five seconds’ worth, and capped the pen. I read it two days later when the binder was open on the bench and he was out at the truck. It said: 7/22 — she didn’t know.
I want to put down what I did after that in the order I did it, because I have told this part fast before, and telling it fast is a way of taking credit for having gotten over it.
I did not speak to him for nine days except about work in front of other people. I took his reed knife out of his roll and kept it in my drawer and used it and let him look for it, twice, and watched him look. On the second of August I drove to Sacred Heart alone without telling him and took the humidity and temperature readings in the chamber, and I knew when I wrote them down that two of them were wrong, and I wrote them down anyway and put NC in the margin. And on a Wednesday in the leather room, with Lorraine sewing eight feet away, I said that Otto would file his own funeral.
Lorraine finished the seam she was on. Then she said, “There’s cake in the front office.”
I didn’t go get any.
The copy of the Immanuel sheet came back from the lawyers in October with a yellow bar across it, and it went in the folder in the second drawer of the flat file, and I did not open that drawer for eleven months. I got other people to pull things out of it. I said I was busy, which was true, and I said it in a voice that made people not ask, which is a thing you can do.
In September he corrected the Sacred Heart readings in his own hand, and initialed the correction, and never said one word to me about it.
ISTJ Behavior: Twenty Minutes at Noon
Zion Evangelical Lutheran in Fond du Lac had an instrument built in 1911 by Brauer & Sons of Milwaukee, in an oak case that has never left the wall it was made for. We had the contract from November of 2013. The scrap list came out of the budget in the spring of 2014, and I typed the barrel inventory off that list, which is how a shop tells itself what it threw away. The 1911 Vox Humana was on it. A Vox is a rank of short-resonator reeds with opinions, the stop people either drive an hour to hear or write letters about, and Zion’s had been unspeakable since at least the sixties.
The dedication was the second Sunday in October, 2018. I had spent three weeks in that room doing the finishing, which is the part where you take everything you did in the shop and correct it for a building, and I knew that instrument by then better than I knew my own apartment. I could have told you every rank on it in order.
Halloran played after the service. He is from Ann Arbor and he plays old American instruments the way you’d talk to somebody’s grandmother, patiently, without showing off. Partway through the last piece he took his left hand off the keys and drew a stop I had not set, and the swell shutters were half open, and the Vox Humana spoke.
It is a sound like a person humming with their mouth closed. Eleven hundred people at Zion heard a nice old organ do a nice old thing. I had my program in both hands and I was looking at the console from the third pew on the left, and what I was thinking, in the plainest possible words, was: he did something.
Roz found me in the narthex afterward with a plastic cup of coffee and said, “I told you we’d get it back.” She meant it. She has never once remembered the list.
I got him in the parking lot. He had the binder under his arm the way he had it under his arm at every job site I ever went to with him.
“Where did that come from.”
“The Vox.”
“It went in a barrel. I typed the inventory.”
“It came off the list in March,” he said. “It’s on the swell sheet.”
“Nobody knew.”
He looked at me a second longer than he needed to. “It’s a 1911 rank in a 1911 case.”
Then he opened the truck door and set the binder on the passenger seat and stood there a minute with the door open, looking north at the weather the way he did.
“Doreen’s holding lunch.”
What Is the ISTJ Personality Type: Four Letters, Six Years Late
I drove to the shop instead of home.
Zion’s folder, swell division, the line for the Vox Humana. Somebody had drawn a single stroke through the scrap notation and written the rank back in above it, and in the date column it said 3/14, and in the margin next to it, in my handwriting, it said NC.
And then I remembered it, which is the part I would take back. He told me at the sink while I was cleaning a shallot. Eight words, maybe ten. The 1911 Vox is going back on. I said okay. I initialed the sheet that morning along with eleven others and went to lunch. I was twenty-five and I had been there two years and I heard it as a man thinking out loud about something he might do.
At twenty after nine at night, in a building with the erecting-room lights off, I typed four letters into a search bar.
The first thing that comes back is the plain version, and the plain version is not wrong. I: attention runs inward, and company spends rather than restores. S: information arrives through what is concrete, particular, and checkable. T: decisions get weighted by criteria before they get weighted by people. J: the world is more comfortable settled than open.
Inside the framework’s own grammar those four letters index something more specific, and it is the specific thing that explains anybody. The letters point at an ordered set of four mental habits, dominant down to least developed, and the order matters more than any single letter. The framework’s names for the four, in this type’s order, are introverted sensing, extraverted thinking, introverted feeling, and extraverted intuition; I am going to keep calling them what I watched them be. For this type the dominant habit is a continuous, unglamorous comparison: what is in front of me now, held against a detailed internal record of what this kind of thing has been before. It runs the way a machinist’s hand knows a thousandth, by feel, against a standard that got built one part at a time.
That is the whole of the seam under the toe board. It is also the whole of the day-late answers, six years of them, which refiled themselves in about a minute while I stood at the flat file. Every one of those days had a folder in it. He answered on Thursday because Wednesday was when he read what that instrument had already done, and the answer he gave me on Thursday was an answer about that organ rather than about organs.
The honest landing, after a night of reading with my coat still on, is narrower than the framework’s admirers want and broader than its critics allow: a durable shared vocabulary for patterns people actually recognize, with real limits, and everything I am about to tell you about Otto is one person’s argument from one vantage.
On how many: the framework’s own tabulations put ISTJ among the more common of the sixteen, somewhere near one in ten. Read that the way you’d read a warranty claim. It counts people who filled out a questionnaire, usually because a school or an employer handed it to them, which is not a sample of Wisconsin or of anywhere.
And a type description is a claim about a crowd. It will be wrong about you somewhere that matters, and that place is worth more of your attention than the eleven paragraphs that fit.
I put the sheet back in the folder in the right place, and the folder back in the drawer, and locked the west door and drove home.
ISTJ Cognitive Functions: What Doesn’t Show from the Nave
The question I couldn’t answer that night took me another year. If the man can put his thumb on the right seam after four minutes with a book, what does he need the binder for?
I asked him in the spring of 2019, in the truck, going up to Manitowoc with a chest in the back.
“You remember all of it anyway,” I said. “Why do you write it down.”
He drove for about a mile.
“Anything I only know is going to leave with me.”
And then, because he wasn’t finished: “There’s a chest at St. Boniface with a fella’s initials on it from 1954. I never met him. I know what he did.”
That is the second habit, the one that sits under the dominant and does its work outward. The internal record is enormous and nobody else can get at it, which makes it worth nothing to a shop in 2054. So it gets put outside: dated, initialed, filed, left where somebody who is not you can consult it after you’re dead. What looks from outside like bureaucracy is that translation, running all the time. It is why the initialing lesson in my third week landed the way it did. He was telling me that the mark I was making was going to be read by a stranger in thirty years, and that I had just told the stranger something.
When he retired he left thirty-one binders on the shelf above the bench, and one afternoon I looked up March 14, 2014. It says: 3/14 — told N. re: 1911 Vox. On the swell sheet. NC initialed.
The third habit is smaller and quieter and it is where the no comes from. Under the record and the paperwork there is a private floor, not argued, not announced, mostly invisible until somebody stands on it. Then not me is that floor. He did not have a position on the chemistry of the gray. He had no theory about the supply house. He had a thing he would not put his name on, and there is no meeting that can vote it away and no argument that gets underneath it, which is why arguing with it feels like arguing with weather. It is also, from the outside, indistinguishable from stubbornness. I could not tell those two apart at twenty-four and I am not sure I always can now.
And then there is the fourth one, the least developed, and I saw it before I had a name for it. The Saturday before the Zion dedication he was in that church at five in the morning. I found him at seven with a legal pad, and the pad was a list of what could go wrong: eleven hundred bodies raising the room four degrees by the second hymn, the tremulant sounding sick in the warm air, a cipher starting under the sermon and not stopping, the boiler. Some of that is a professional’s checklist. Some of it was not. I read the whole thing as thoroughness, and I brought him a coffee, and I got the ladder.
The façade at Zion has twenty-nine pipes in it and eleven of them are wood and don’t speak. Behind the case there’s a room you can walk into, with a light switch on the left, and that is where the instrument is.
ISTJ Under Stress: The Winter He Wouldn’t Stop Talking
Between November of 2018 and the middle of March, Otto called my house eleven times after nine at night. In the six years before that he had called it never.
What he wanted to talk about was the future, which he had no equipment for. The shop closing. What happens to two hundred instruments in this half of the state when the shop closes. Whether Immanuel could come after Sacred Heart, which is not a thing that can happen. What Doreen would do about insurance for eighteen months. A fourth instrument with the gray in it that he could not name and could not stop describing. He was, for about four months, the least reliable narrator of the future in that building, and everybody in that building had spent a decade treating him as the instrument you set the others by.
The framework has a shape for this and the shape is useful. The habit that sits last in the stack is the one that runs on possibility: it takes what is in front of you and spins outward into what might follow. In this type it is the fourth chair, underdeveloped and rarely used, and under real load the person gets pushed into it. So the future arrives and there is no record for it, because the future is the one place a record cannot reach, and the least practiced habit in the house has to take the call. It fills the room and it fills it badly, and it generates in the direction the pressure is already pointing, which is down.
That is the honest version of July, too. In the front office on the twenty-second I read him as calm, and I resented the calm, and the calm was a man who had read everything twice the night before. Prepared and calm look identical from across a table. Only one of them is a state of mind.
The shop had a name for the winter, which was that Otto was having a February. A February ends, and the joke is built on its ending. If the person you know is still down in May, or if the calls are still coming in June, that has stopped being a stop-list problem and has become a question for a doctor or a licensed therapist, and I would rather say that plainly here than leave it sitting inside a joke about weather.
The last call came on a Thursday in March. He asked whether I had taken the humidity at St. Boniface. I said I had. He said, “Read them to me.” I read him nine numbers off a sheet. He said, “Okay,” and hung up, and that was the end of it.
ISTJ Relationships and Compatibility: The Coffee Cake
Doreen Bergquist came to the shop two or three times a year, always with something in foil, and stayed forty minutes, and talked about things that had no organs in them. The last time before he retired she spent most of it on the parking situation at Zion, about which she has views, and then told the basement flood story from 1994, in which she is the only person who behaves well and Roz’s father comes off very poorly indeed.
What I know about the receiving end of all that filing, I know from the shop side, which is the wrong side. But some of it carries. Being on somebody’s record is two things arriving in one envelope. You are checked, which nobody enjoys, and you are also kept, which is rarer than people think and does not announce itself. Otto knew the date of every conversation we had ever had that mattered. He did not know, and would not have thought to say, that I had spent four years waiting for him to tell me I was any good. Both of those are the same habit. The first one is what it does well.
What that habit does inside a marriage or a household is a different vantage and a different piece of writing, and the person who could have told me was in the front office with a cake and I never asked her one question about it. It also does not land the same way on everybody it lands on, and that difference is not small.
She wrapped the rest of the cake in foil and left it on the front counter, and by two the plate was in the sink and nobody had said anything about it.
ISTJ Careers: Two Numbers on a Card
The trade suits this type and everybody in it knows so, in the way you know things you have never said out loud. A shop is a machine for not losing information across forty years and three owners and two fires, and the person who runs on a filed record is the load-bearing wall of that machine. What the work does not do is hand out credit for it. Nobody in a nave has ever applauded a service log. The applause goes to the tonal design and the case and the recitalist, and the reason the instrument is still playable in 2054 will be a set of initials in a margin that nobody will look up.
How a room decides to read that, and what the reading costs, is a different piece and a different vantage than mine, because I was below him on the chart the whole time and never once saw the shop from the side that writes the reviews. Some rooms read the same behavior as steadiness and some read it as a person who will not grow, and which one you get is not entirely up to you.
Here is the place where the vocabulary gets me nothing. Otto knew in February of 2018 what the Sacred Heart pouches meant for the other two instruments. He knew it before the insurer did and he knew it before I did. He did not call Manitowoc and he did not call Sheboygan. When I asked him about it in 2020 he said the claim was the claim and the rest was Roz’s to write, and that is a completely true sentence about how a shop is organized, and it is not an answer. Sacred Heart got remediated because Sacred Heart complained. Both of the others are still playing on the gray, and both of them will go the same way, and one of them has a Sunday-school wing they are still paying for.
I have been the head voicer since January. The numbers for both parishes are on a card behind my license, and have been since March.
ISTJ Personal Growth: The Porch Light
He retired in December of 2021, at sixty-four, after forty-two years. There was a cake, from the same kitchen.
Junie Vang started in February and she is better with her hands at twenty-two than I was at twenty-six. Three weeks in I gave her a pen and asked her what she was telling me when she put her letters on a sheet, and she said, “That I did the work,” and I heard the whole thing happen again from the other chair. I also noticed, that same week, that I already had a version of Junie I could do at a bar. I have not stopped doing it. I have only started hearing it, which is less than I would like to be able to report.
The growth advice written for this type is a list of things to loosen, and I have never once seen a person loosen on instruction. What I actually watched, in one man, over one year, was narrower than that and I think more useful. In 2019 he added a column to the service entries for who had been told a thing, separate from the column for who had done it. That is a change of about an inch of ruled paper. It is also the only change I ever saw him make, and he made it because a thing had gone wrong in a room with three people in it and one of them was me. The capacity was already in the habit. What it needed was a person standing where he could see her.
Doreen has called me twice since he retired, in April and in June. Both times she asked whether the Zion Vox was holding its tuning, which is Otto asking. I told her it was, and it is. I know what he wants from me and it is the instruments, and I would rather be the person who keeps them right than the person who sits in his kitchen and makes him do the part where you say things out loud.
Last month I finished a regulation at Zion and came back up 151, and their road is on the way, more or less. It was four in the afternoon and the light over the door was on, which Doreen does in the afternoon and forgets. I went past at forty and picked up County G and was home in twenty minutes.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.