Alan Pakaln

Into It Alan Pakaln

These are transcriptions from recorded interviews that took place in1994. At the time, a book of job-related interviews did not attract muchattention, that is, besides Studs Terkel's Working. Interviewing a range of different kinds of people was an amazingexperience. For me, it was an excuse to meet someone very interestingand to ask questions about their lives - how often do you get the chanceto do that?Transcribing spoken words from recordings at that time was arduous -no speech recognition software - just a foot pedal on a tape playbackmachine. These transcript are only edited to remove some ums, andohs, and my questions and comments. It does seem as though they aretelling a story - and they are - but actually it was a conversation. It's life stories: experiences told from a subjective viewpoint, bringingthe human experience to where we can see it - each story spoken in thelanguage of the inventor.