Meanderings: March 16, 2000

Thursday,
March 16, 2000

Allow me to quote "Bloom County" -- I am full-blown gonzo confused. Am I making all this look too easy or something? Or am I just a spineless wimp who's too damn compassionate for her own good?

Allow me to explain. BA and I met with the customer for our project yesterday. Said customer is a specialist, a genius in his own field, and has been developing the teacher training courses for this tool we're working on.

Problem is, the courses are a little hard to follow -- not surprising, seeing as the tool is a complex one and the customer isn't trained as a teacher. So it was decided that the fix-it for this problem would be three detailed exercises that lead a student through the tool step-by-step.

Guess who's writing these exercises? You betcha. Normally, I wouldn't mind -- I'm doing the educational packages anyway, so it only makes sense for me to do the exercises.

Yeah, except that I'm not just doing the educational packages -- I'm developing new GUI pages, remodeling old ones, fixing text, writing user text and on-line help pages, updating the project webpage, and generally making sure that all documentation is archived. All this is in addition to the work I'm doing for WINE/Pepper/whatever the hell we're going to call it (thanks a lot for all the suggestions, people -- NOT. What do I have to do, post Bondage Barbie binaries to get your attention?). In other words, Mellie is a very busy camper and will be for the forseeable future.

So now, on top of everything else, I'm doing three exercises. But wait -- there's more. During the meeting, the three exercises grew to six. Then the customer emailed me that evening and added a seventh. Okay, fine, seven exercises. If they have to be done, they have to be done.

What frosts my gonads is BA turning around and saying, "This won't take long, right? What, eight hours tops?" Ah, hah. Ahahahahahahahahaha. Excuse me while I go pound my head against that wall over there.

*WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM*

Ah, that's so much better. It took me five hours this afternoon just to do an exercise and a fifth, and these are the two easiest exercises of the bunch. All of which has led me to an unpleasant conclusion -- very few managers really understand what technical writers do. They see us peering at monitors and tapping frantically on keyboards, and figure, "Well, it's all just words -- can't be that hard, can it?"

Uh, yeah, it is. A good technical writer has to do with human language what a programmer does with machine language -- s/he breaks down complex concepts, tasks and instructions into basic, easy to understand pieces. If you think that's a breeze, I cordially invite you to write down, in plain English, using basic words and short sentences, instructions for programming a VCR. Hell, most people can't DO this, much less EXPLAIN how to do it.

So here I sit, drowning my sorrows in a glass of filtered water, wondering just how someone as cute and talented as I am got herself into this fukaktah situation. I could have been an happily itinerant waitress/screenwriter/actress by now, but noooooo, I had to get myself a real job.

Oh, yeah, and I managed to fall off a curb coming back from the dentist this morning (how the hell did I fall off a 4 INCH HIGH CURB?), neatly shredding my left knee and spraining both my wrist and ankle on that side, so I'm now limping along like Quasimodo.

Any more of this shit, and I'm asking for my own bell tower. . .

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