Work Quote by David Leslie

You can hear the bureaucratic sigh between the commas: a man narrating logistics while quietly trying to justify a decision after the fact. Leslie’s focus isn’t the workshop itself, but the labor of getting there - “we’ve had to set... we’ve had to equip...” repeated like an invoice. The phrasing frames the work as unavoidable, even burdensome, implying scrutiny from someone asking why time and money were spent. It’s less celebration than a defense brief.

The pivot is the real tell: “But all that equipment is there now.” That “but” functions like a moral eraser, converting past costs into present legitimacy. Classic institutional rhetoric: the sunk cost becomes an asset, and the asset becomes a promise. The sentence trails off into a hazy handoff to an unnamed “they,” which conveniently distances the speaker from future outcomes. Leslie isn’t promising specific results; he’s promising optionality.

“Whatever projects they want to use it for in the future” sounds democratic, even generous, but it’s also strategically noncommittal. “Whatever” avoids measurable deliverables. “In the future” postpones evaluation. The subtext is political insurance: if the original project underwhelms, the workshop can be rebranded as infrastructure for the next thing. It’s a familiar move in public spending, education initiatives, nonprofit grant cycles, even corporate innovation labs - where permanence (equipment, space, capability) is used to launder uncertainty (impact, adoption, success).

The intent, then, is to reframe a potentially controversial build-out as a long-term community resource. The vagueness isn’t accidental; it’s the point.