Remember we’re talking here about computer scientists, computer professionals, software engineers, computer professors, and other people whose first thought on looking at a new bit of tech isn’t my usual “oooh pretty I want one,” but rather a chin-stroking “hm, what sort of chip does that operate on?” (This is true: I have a little robotic Dalek (google it if you’re inadequately geeky, or if you're so geeky you won't follow the link) on my desk because I think it’s funny. Visiting volunteers never fail to try to analyze its innards.) Much of the time I spent with those folks last week was focused on the question of what comes after paper.

We all know that question, and it’s important and key to many of us on a daily basis. We worry about whether readers will follow titles that have migrated to online delivery; we fret about what features the iPad version should have, and fuss about whether to start with Android or Apple; we argue endlessly about the superior benefits or utter horribleness of this or that platform or operating system or mobile device. We express profound, brow-furrowed concern about all these issues, and we spend days, weeks, and months dedicated to researching, analyzing, hypothesizing, reporting, bloviating, and arguing about strategies, technologies, and how to manage the transition. We even name our blogs after the question. These are serious questions that carry a lot of importance on a lot of different levels, and they deserve all the attention they get from us.

Anyway, on Friday night, after the meetings and banquets were over, a volunteer and I went to a local, family-owned restaurant in Albuquerque near our hotel. The desk clerk at the Hyatt had sheepishly recommended it after we assured her that we were interested in a good local place that reflected local cuisine, and not the hoity-toity four-star seafood place she kept promoting. (I mean, really: seafood in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert? Spare me.) So off we trotted to La Esquina, a tiny place tucked away in a subterranean urban-renewal project that had clearly failed to take off, as suggested by the dry central fountain and empty storefronts. But there was La Esquina, and there we dined.

Our waitress came to our table with an infectious energy and friendliness that assured us (if the amazing homemade salsa had not already done so) that we were in A Good Place. Being that way, I asked about the large-ish tattoo on her right arm, and that’s where the story begins.

So she had a Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed on her right bicep, under the word “Grandma,” and over eight small flowers that, we were told, represented Grandma’s eight children, only six of whom had survived (we had not yet ordered our meal). Delighted with our interest, she proceeded to show her other arm, where her son’s name was tattooed above her wrist, and her husband’s near her elbow, and her mother, represented for some still unknown reason by Betty Boop, in the middle. (We still had not ordered.) Our waitress then sort of surprised us by hiking up her right pants leg to show a dense array of flowers and Disney characters that, she said, each represented one of her various cousins, of whom there were many. Then up came the left pants leg, and she displayed her calf. “And this one is for me,” she said, proudly displaying Wonder Woman rampant, taking up most of her lower leg. (And with our waitress now as fully displayed as I cared to see, it was now time to order what turned out to be an excellent dinner.)

So I’m going to go way out on a limb here, and at the risk of being accused of stereotyping or making undue assumptions, I’m going to suggest that our waitress, in her free time, when she's not working one of her two waitressing jobs (she’d had a third job, with the city, but had been recently laid off from that one), does not spend as much time as we do fretting about whether the next magazine she reads will be in paper or on the Web. Someday, in fact, she may be alarmed to discover that her copy of "Entertainment Weekly" (and don’t get all snippy with me, because I subscribe too) is no longer available in print at the grocery store checkout. She may (and again with the assumptions) not be delighted to learn that she can access EW easily on a thousand-dollar tablet device, or, failing that, via her high-speed Internet connection at home. (According to a recent FCC study, some 26 million Americans lack access to broadband, and somewhere north of a third of Americans have no personal Internet access whatsoever.) She has most likely not considered the implications of open access, digital delivery, streaming multimedia, or whether or not the concept of a “magazine” still has meaning in a nonprint world.

(To be fair, I don’t much concern myself with how to juggle twelve tables of orders for various varieties and permutations of enchiladas or tortillas. I don’t have to think about what shoes to wear for two jobs that require me to be on my feet for thirteen hours a day, and I don’t have to wonder how I’m going to pay the rent working only two jobs rather than three. But that, again, is not the point.)

One point is that we should not lose sight of the simple fact that we live in a broader world where a lot of people put a lot of thought into how to best depict a cousin’s personality in ink on their skin, and don’t really care about iPads or Androids or even—gasp—PDFs. Our waitress already made her choice of media. She didn’t choose a website or a diary or a photograph; she chose her skin. It was the media choice that made the most sense to her, that gave her the long-term access to content that was meaningful to her. She wasn’t just decorating herself; she was comemorating and communicating important things about the people in her life, and herself, in a way that guaranteed it wouldn’t be lost.

Admitedly, our waitress at La Esquina is probably not representative of the readership of our technical journals (again with the assumptions), but it doesn't matter. Those are the same issues we’re all struggling with these days, whether we work in the rarefied environment of computer science publications, or in a little Mexican restaurant somewhere under Albuquerque: How do we deliver our content in a way that makes sense to us, to its creators, and to readers; how do we deliver information that retains its value and accessibility and relevance? In short, how can we be sure that the decisions we make are not driven by the moment, by whatever shiny slab most recently caught our eye, but by the same sense of permanence, or at least delayed obsolescence, that drives the decision to have an inky needle repeatedly poked into oneself.

While it seems unlikely to me that we’re going to settle on tattoo parlors as a primary delivery platform for Computer any time soon, it's certainly a paperless medium and should maybe be in the running if we want to broaden our market. Seriously, at the very least it should remind us that there are a lot of people out there who are our readers, whose expectations and requirements may not be all the same as a core group who live and breathe new technologies and new publishing media. And some of those people have tattoos.