As an example of this, I used to work in the records section of the National Weather Service. I maintained the records of the thousands of weather reporting devices spread across the nation. Keeping those records was necessary to determine which devices worked well, which did not, and which kept getting vandalized. NWS needed this information to maintain all the devices efficiently. But on any given day, if I wasn't there, the weather reporting went on.
As an example of this, I used to work in the records section of the National Weather Service. I maintained the records of the thousands of weather reporting devices spread across the nation. Keeping those records was necessary to determine which devices worked well, which did not, and which kept getting vandalized. NWS needed this information to maintain all the devices efficiently. But on any given day, if I wasn't there, the weather reporting went on.
True; the terms "essential" and "non-essential" should be replaced by something more correctly descriptive like "time-critical" and "non-time-critical".