He ended up on an Alaskan salmon boat. The tender, who picks up the catch from the fisherman and carries it back to the cannery, has to keep a lot of records, from tickets issued for payments to reports filed for the fisheries board, all on a deck slippery with scales and blood. This particular tender, Sherry says, had duct-taped a notebook computer to the entryway of his cabin. In my wildest dreams in graduate school I couldn't have imagined a job this great. She found close-knit communities revolving around family and the table.
Dinners are hours-long affairs, husbands come home for lunch and the kitchen is the center of life.
In Italy, it would be food. But technology in other forms holds possibilities. In households where shoe boxes full of photos were pulled out to show Bell the family history and tell family stories, digital cameras proved interesting. Sometimes, just seeing and understanding an act as simple as a piece of paper being handed between colleagues holds the solution to a difficult problem. Marilyn Whalen of Xerox's Knowledge Interaction and Practice section was researching better ways to train call center workers at the company's Lewisville, Texas, site in 1996.