Thank you for joining us today at Mormon Stories, a few quick reminders. If you value what we're doing here at Mormon Stories and want to keep this program alive past July 2010, please consider signing up today to become a monthly paid subscriber to Mormon Stories.

All donations are tax deductible. They will go directly to the time and materials used to produce the show and you can sign up for as little as $5 a month at MormonStories.org.

Thank you for listening and please enjoy the show.

So Damon, let's switch gears. Now that you've sort of brought us to the present to modern Mormonism, why don't we switch back to the narrative of your life story?

Let's talk about your employment at the church office building. I understand you started working there while you were finishing your PhD dissertation.

That's right. It's a little bit ironic to be writing a history of a thing and then you have to step into the history as a sort of employee of the thing that you've just been describing.

But yeah, when I was near the end of it, my applied for a job just almost on a whim. I never really had any notion that I'd actually get employed. There had no experience doing what they were asking for, which was user experience research. I didn't even know what that meant.

Explain that for our listeners. What is user experience research that you're supposed to be conducting?

Well, officially I was supposed to be doing things like, can people click through the website to get at what they want to get at if they're searching for, let's say, a polyandry on lds.org?

How many times you have to click the mouse to find that? How long does it take them to look at the screen to find the link that they're looking for?

That's the basics of what I understand about user experience research. It's a web-based thing.

It turned out that that wasn't actually what they were looking for. What they were looking for is almost pretty well in line with what I had training in, which was analyzing Mormon culture and how mass media shapes Mormon culture.

What they were looking for apparently was somebody who could do audience research on church media. Let's say they produce a DVD that's a training video for bishops.

How do people in Mexico interpret this church media? What about a church website? How does it translate culturally?

It was really a vague job description. I was vague enough, apparently, to somehow land the job.

You're mentioning polyandry and how long it would take to find on the church website. You got me curious.

While we're sitting here, I went to lds.org. I went into the general search screen to search all content. I typed in the word polyandry and it tells me that your search for polyandry has returned zero results in all church content.

Yeah, it doesn't exist.

This is probably a good time to segue to your book that you wrote in which you basically mainly a memoir of your experience working at the church office building.

And you title it the book of Maman a book about a book about the corporation that owns the Mormon church.

Why don't you tell our listeners about just even just picking the title because obviously it's an interesting title. So tell the listeners what does the title of the book tell, you know, tell listeners about what the book will be.

What it's about what's about a book. Well, the original sort of working title was to two masters bound. And you know, I sort of got a lot of positive feedback with it, but it also seemed like maybe it was about some kind of SNM operation that was going on.

...