[Themaintainers] maintainers reading group 10/10/2016 7pm EST

[Ensmenger, Nathan]

"A service call is occasioned by a problem in the relationship between the customer and the machine, and nei­ther is articulate in the terms used by technicians to talk about their work. Customers talk about machines in their terms and those they have learned from technicians, while machines com­municate through behavior, error codes, and machine logs; from all of these, the technicians must construct an understanding of the situation that permits them to resolve it…” (p. 30)

"There is an existential dilemma at the heart of service: the techni­cians are responsible in a world in which they have very little control. Their job is to respond to trouble and to anticipate and avoid trouble when they can, but the setting in which they per­form is largely constructed by other people, is inhabited by other people, and is inherently unpredictable.” (p. 57)

"A technician’s primary goal is to keep the customer happy, and this includes but is not limited to fixing the machine as necessary.” (p. 32)

Julian Orr, *Talking About Machines*

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Just a reminder that tomorrow night (Monday, October 10) at 7pm there will be a virtual reading group dedicated to talking about Julian Orr’s 1996 classic *Talking About Machines: an Ethnography of a Modern Job*.   Everyone is invited to participate.  We will be using Adobe Connect, which means that you will need access to a web browser or the Adobe Connect client (available for most desktop and mobile OSes).  I will open up the meeting space at about 6:30 in order to work out any last minute technical glitches.  You may also want to check your email frequently around that time in case I need to send out last minute tech updates.

The URL for the meeting is https://connect.iu.edu/maintainers/

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Finally, if the you have never experienced the frustration of dealing with poorly maintained office equipment, you might want to watch (or rewatch) the marvelous “printer” scene from the 1999 film *Office Space.*  You can find two short scenes setting up the conflict between users and machine at:

https://youtu.be/Mw-8oEO8bZo
https://youtu.be/p0hDorkxAPM

and then watch the humans take their glorious revenge:

https://youtu.be/N9wsjroVlu8 

Looking forward to tomorrow night!

-Nathan 

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Nathan Ensmenger 
Associate Professor of Informatics 
School of Informatics and Computing 
Indiana University, Bloomington 
homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/