Description: This paper analyzes a non-standard apprenticeship system in a financial call centre. The work is organised round two pieces of new technology: an auto-dialler (which cold-calls clients and allocates them to human callers) and a data base which records the human caller's dialogue with each client. New employees learn the art of telephone negotiation through an 'apprenticeship' to these two pieces of software. Methodology: The role of the software to which the callers are 'apprenticed' is theorised from the perspective of the socio-cultural theory of tool construction and use. The software mediates the organisation's memory and newcomers learn through their experience of the software's social utilisation scheme. Conclusions: It broadens the concept of apprenticeship by basing it on interchanges between the apprentice and an artefact rather than between an apprentice and a human 'master'. Yet the artefact is essentially human as it is the record of innumerable human-to-human dialogues within this community.