They use scanners now instead of ink and paper to record fingerprints, and I am amazed. The machine looks like just a layer of glass and a mirror, and I couldn't figure it out. So I asked the woman about it while she rolled my fingers one by one across the plate.
She didn't know what the machine was called. She didn't know anything about how the image was collected. She seemed surprised that anyone would ask, like it had never crossed her mind. She knew which button to press between scans and that was it. Which may explain why she seemed bored.
I should have told her the story about the kitchen woman who is visited by a famous lecturer. They talk and she complains about her work. He asks some generic questions, then says, "where do you work?" and she says she sits on the stairs. "What are the bricks made of?" She admits she doesn't know. He tells her to learn. So she begins researching and ends up learning enough that she writes a book about bricks. She meets the lecturer again, who is impressed, but then he asks, "what's under the bricks?"
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