It's mid-spring in 2001 and you've just moved to Midsize City, Texas. You order telephone service from a company we'll call Telecorp. You pick up a phone – not your own, of course, but one that you borrow from a friend or even one that is thoughtfully provided in the offices of the telecommunications company itself. You speak at some length with a Customer Service representative. Several days later the phone jacks in your new place are turned on. You plug in your phone line and begin dialing. What could be simpler?

Within Telecorp, however, your information has to undergo an extended series of transformations. In Customer Service, the information is written up in a file order confirmation (FOC), a form based on a word processor template. It is e-mailed to a supervisor, who forwards it to a data entry worker. That worker prints it out, highlights particular pieces of information, and enters data into the centralized database. The FOC also gets forwarded to other places: Credit & Collections, where workers make sure that you're creditworthy; CLEC Provisioning, where you're assigned a phone number from the database used by all telecommunications companies in the area, and your physical address is keyed into the 911 database; CLEC Design, where your personal circuit is designed and associated with the number you've been assigned. And just as the FOC is transformed in different ways to meet the needs of those different groups, the transformations themselves engender more transformations.