The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine

维护新机器的灵魂

THEY ATE TOGETHER every chance they could. They had to. The enormous photocopiers they were responsible for maintaining were so complex, temperamental, and variable between models and upgrades that it was difficult to keep the machines functioning without frequent conversations with their peers about the ever-shifting nuances of repair and care. The core of their operational knowledge was social. That’s the subject of this chapter.

他们只要有机会就会聚在一起吃饭。他们必须这样做。他们负责维护的巨型复印机非常复杂、脾气古怪，且不同型号和升级版本之间差异巨大。如果不与同行频繁交流维修和保养中不断变化的细微差别，就很难让这些机器正常运转。他们操作知识的核心在于社交。这正是本章的主题。

It was the mid-1980s. They were the technician teams charged with servicing the Xerox machines that suddenly were providing all of America’s offices with vast quantities of photocopies and frustration. The machines were so large, noisy, and busy that most offices kept them in a separate room. An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily. The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.

那是20世纪80年代中期。这些技术团队负责维修施乐（Xerox）复印机，这些机器当时突然为全美的办公室提供了海量的复印件，同时也带来了巨大的挫败感。这些机器体积庞大、噪音嘈杂且工作繁忙，大多数办公室都将它们单独放在一个房间里。一位好奇的人类学家发现，技术人员每天在这些机器上所做的工作，与施乐公司高层认为他们所做的工作有着天壤之别，而这种偏差正在给公司造成不必要的阻碍。他揭示真相后所引发的一系列故事值得详细叙述，因为它展示了专业维护人员在高模糊度环境下工作的独创性，揭示了制度化的错误工作理论所造成的危害，以及这种错误理论在抵制变革时所展现出的顽固力量。

The cover of Julian Orr’s influential Talking About Machines shows technicians working on the Xerox 5090 photocopier, introduced in 1990. Though they were doing messy blue-collar work, Xerox required the technicians to act and dress white-collar. They carried their tools in a briefcase.

朱利安·奥尔（Julian Orr）那本颇具影响力的著作《谈论机器》（Talking About Machines）的封面上，展示了技术人员正在维修1990年推出的施乐5090复印机。尽管他们从事的是脏乱的蓝领工作，但施乐公司要求技术人员表现得像白领一样，并穿着白领服装。他们甚至用公文包来携带工具。

The anthropologist was Julian Orr. In 1979, he was hired by Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in northern California to provide technical support for two machines being developed there—the Alto computer and a color laser printer. By 1984 he had migrated to studying Xerox service technicians, encouraged by John Seely Brown, then a lab manager, later director of PARC. Orr’s research culminated in a remarkable book titled Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, published in 1996. His book shows that the most baffling problems the technicians faced in their machines were solved by discussion, and the most instructive element in their conversation was what Orr calls “war stories”—narratives the technicians told each other about how they worked through a bewildering problem in a machine to arrive at a satisfying solution.

这位人类学家就是朱利安·奥尔。1979年，他被北加州的施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心（PARC）聘用，为该中心正在开发的两种机器——Alto计算机和彩色激光打印机——提供技术支持。到1984年，在时任实验室经理、后来担任PARC负责人的约翰·西利·布朗（John Seely Brown）的鼓励下，他转而研究施乐的维修技术人员。奥尔的研究最终汇集成了一本杰出的著作，即1996年出版的《谈论机器：现代工作的民族志》。他的书表明，技术人员在机器上遇到的最令人困惑的问题，都是通过讨论解决的，而他们对话中最具启发性的部分是奥尔所说的“战争故事”——即技术人员之间讲述的关于他们如何克服机器中令人困惑的问题并最终达成满意解决方案的叙述。

The stories also establish the teller’s contribution to the local community of technicians. Orr writes: Given that the only status within the community is that of competent practitioner, fame can only be based on a reputation for extraordinarily competent practice, the ability to solve newer and harder problems. Since technicians normally work alone, achievements will only be known if the person responsible tells them. Moreover, technicians want the information to circulate, so that others can address similar problems. A team shares responsibility for its calls, so there is incentive to have all members competent for as many problems as possible.

这些故事也确立了讲述者对当地技术人员群体的贡献。奥尔写道：“鉴于群体内唯一的地位就是‘胜任的从业者’，名声只能建立在卓越的实践能力和解决更新、更难问题的能力之上。由于技术人员通常独自工作，只有当事人讲述出来，他们的成就才会被人知晓。此外，技术人员希望信息能够流通，以便他人也能解决类似的问题。一个团队共同承担服务任务，因此所有成员都有动力去尽可能多地掌握解决各种问题的能力。”

Often, the issue was not with the copier but with unintentionally destructive behavior by the users. That, too, was considered fixable. Orr declares that the technicians’ practice is a continuous, highly skilled improvisation within a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine…. Narrative forms a primary element of this practice. The actual process of diagnosis involves the creation of a coherent account of the troubled state of the machine from available pieces of unintegrated information…. A coherent diagnostic narrative constitutes a technician’s mastery of the problematic situation. Narrative preserves such diagnoses as they are told to colleagues…. The circulation of stories among the community of technicians is the principal means by which the technicians stay informed of the developing subtleties of machine behavior in the field.

通常，问题不在于复印机本身，而在于用户无意中的破坏性行为。这也同样被认为是可修复的。奥尔宣称，技术人员的实践是在技术人员、客户和机器这三者关系中进行的持续且高超的即兴创作……叙事构成了这种实践的主要要素。诊断的实际过程涉及从现有的零散信息中，为机器的故障状态创建一个连贯的解释……一个连贯的诊断叙事构成了技术人员对问题情境的掌控。叙事将这些诊断结果保存下来，并传达给同事……在技术人员群体中流传的故事，是他们了解现场机器行为细微变化的主要手段。

By the mid-1980s, Xerox copiers had reached such a degree of complexity that “individual machines,” Orr writes, “are quite idiosyncratic, new failure modes appear continuously, and rote procedure cannot address unknown problems.”

到20世纪80年代中期，施乐复印机的复杂程度已经达到如此地步，以至于奥尔写道：“每一台机器都非常独特，新的故障模式不断出现，死记硬背的程序无法解决未知的问题。”

Specifying the exact features for a copying job on the 9400’s control panel was not for the faint of heart. Users varied in their sophistication. When the machine had a problem, some customers could communicate helpfully with the repair technicians. Many could not. Some were, in fact, the cause of the problem.

在9400型的控制面板上为复印任务指定精确的功能，绝非胆小者所能为。用户的熟练程度各不相同。当机器出现问题时，有些客户能与维修技术人员进行有效的沟通，但许多人做不到。事实上，有些人本身就是问题的根源。

For example, the famous Xerox 9400 that was introduced in 1977 weighed one and a half tons and took up floor space measuring nine by fifteen feet. It cost $85,000 ($430,000 in 2024). Automatically feeding up to 3,000 sheets of paper, it made copies at a rate of two per second and collated them into 50 separate bins. It could read and write two-sided sheets, and the image size was adjustable. Every stage of the process required extreme precision—from imaging to paper handling to managing the sequence of electric fields that transferred the image-bearing toner onto the paper, then pressing and baking the toner into the paper, and cleaning everything to be ready for the next image a half-second later. A fault anywhere in that sequence or in the control system could cause degraded copies or take down the whole machine.

例如，1977年推出的著名施乐9400型复印机重达1.5吨，占地面积为9英尺乘15英尺。其售价为8.5万美元（相当于2024年的43万美元）。它能自动进纸多达3000张，以每秒两张的速度进行复印，并将其整理到50个独立的纸槽中。它能够读取和打印双面纸张，且图像尺寸可调。过程中的每一个阶段都需要极高的精度——从成像到纸张处理，再到管理将带有图像的碳粉转移到纸张上的电场序列，然后将碳粉压入并烘烤到纸张上，最后进行清理，以便在半秒后准备好处理下一张图像。该序列或控制系统中的任何一处故障，都可能导致复印质量下降，甚至使整台机器瘫痪。

A technician who serviced 9400s in the 1980s recalls: This machine was the main method of information distribution for the entire Federal Government for quite a while… I took service calls on these machines coming from the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Mapping Agency, the N…

一位在20世纪80年代维修过9400型复印机的技术人员回忆道：“在相当长的一段时间里，这台机器是整个联邦政府信息分发的主要方式……我曾接到过来自五角大楼、中央情报局、国务院、国防测绘局以及N……等机构关于这些机器的维修电话。”