The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
Anthropologist Julian Orr embedded with Xerox field technicians in the mid-1980s and found their core operational knowledge was social—war stories, not manuals, kept the machines running.
What Matters
- Orr’s 1996 book Talking About Machines documented that Xerox technicians solved baffling failures through peer narrative, not documented procedure.
- The Xerox 9400 (1977) weighed 1.5 tons, cost $85,000 ($430K in 2024), and served the Pentagon, CIA, and NIH—failure had high institutional stakes.
- Half of all service calls were caused by user misuse, not mechanical fault; technicians’ adage: “Don’t fix the machine, fix the customer.”
- Xerox corporate believed technicians followed structured diagnostic procedures; Orr showed they improvised continuously within a technician-customer-machine triangle.
- Lucy Suchman’s 1983 video of AI pioneer Allan Newell and computational linguist Ronald Kaplan failing for 90 minutes on a Xerox 8200 silenced a room of Rochester executives.
- Technicians guarded customer relationships fiercely: social damage from another tech entering their territory was harder to repair than the machine.
- [HN: @claxo] Frames it as knowledge-driven community conflict—field technicians vs. Xerox corporate over what the work actually was.
- [HN: @nicbou] Has read an earlier draft; calls every chapter excellent—suggests the full book sustains this quality of primary-source ethnography.
