Here’s a wonderful site if, like me, you’re fascinated by how people do their work: rodcorp (via Kevin Kelly).
I love this kind of thing. If I can get a person talking about it, I’m yet to find a job for which the ins and outs were not fascinating.
My personal favourite was perhaps the Newcastle cabdriver who, it turned out, was a significant player in the local cab registration market, an artifact of fantastic (and fascinating) human and legal complexity. He was planning to shortly retire on the proceeds of a small collection of license plates that he’d purchased at opportune times; at the time the going rate was about $150,000, if I recall correctly. He informed me that driving a cab was for the birds; the real money was in buying and selling the plates.
Interesting. Although I couldn’t find the story about the cabbie.
The cabbie is a personal story – I met the cabbie on one of my trips to Newcastle. On my next trip, I asked a different cabbie about the same subject. He had a completely different take on the best investment strategies, but was nearly as caught up in the license plate market.