The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

They were amazing at doing things which really mattered: shrinking an A0 architectural drawing down but maintaining aspect ratio. Adjusting offsets for the print for binding signatures, so the 1st and 16th page was not too far out because of wrapping around the other 8 pairs of pages. Even just working out how to rotate the pages for N-up printing. But the GUI sucked. I think they called ours "the bindery" because it's main gig was doing PHD from soup to nuts, binding included.

The repair techs had the most amazing flight cases, packed with tools which served one specific purpose.Like, A doohickey to adjust the corona wire, without dismantling the imaging and toner roller, with a tonne of equipment hovering over your head on a gas-lift. Screwdrivers with very very carefully chosen lengths. Torque wrenches. It was high tech meets motor racing meets.. IBM.

I am told they were paid better than many computer techs. The IBM guy was paid IBM scale to fix it on IBMs timescales. the xerox guy did more random shit, with more devices, more often.

They had a very corporate look. that amazing briefcase or six. Suit, tie. Very acceptable.

I know a guy who worked for a paper-folding-and-envelope-stuffing company and it was very similar culturally: can-do, fix anything, but working on giant multi-million dollar machines which were used twice a year to do tax mailouts, and election materials, and the rest of the time rented to the original spam merchants for 10c per thousand mailouts. The secondhand value of these machines were like photocopiers: Really significant. He was brought out of retirement to help take one apart into TEU equivalent chunks to be shipped to Singapore from Brisbane. His retirement gig at one point was repairing Espresso machines, he said it made him feel familiar and useful.

The era which was the end of the typing pool was fascinating. All kinds of arcane roles which only make sense in the absence of email and tiny printers everywhere. Some of those jobs had been there from the days of hand-copying, Dickens-era and before.

Nobody knows how old it is. It predated the folk who came with it (all of whom were close to retirement.)

It's still running (looked after by one of the retirees on a part time basis.) He does print runs a couple times a week. To seem him with an oil can in his hands is to step back in time.

It's more or less neutral profit-wise, but pays his wage and keeps some old customers happy. When he gives up the machine goes too (likely for scrap I guess).

To use a fancy word there's a "noosphere" around that carries knowledge and lore along with it.

Plus the usual kind of Deming wisdom about real knowledge organisation:

    "in many ways opposite of traditional management...innovations are
    started at the grassroots level.", and "people will give their best
    when the work itself is challenging and rewarding."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming