Tag Archives: personal

Being friendly?

life,

This morning was a bit of a mess. I lost track of time. My poor hubby wasn’t feeling well. I got out of the house late. I missed the bus I wanted to catch, the next bus was late. The drawbridge went up just as we got to it. A later neighborhood on the route which is usually peaceful and flies by had stop-and-go traffic.

And a co-worker called in sick.

But none of that was terribly bad. No, what was bad was the manic guy who got on the bus three stops after me, absolutely intent on Being Friendly. He could not shut up. And it would not be accurate to say he wouldn’t stop talking.

Talking implies he had an inside voice.

No, he had to announce and exclaim everything, with vigorous hand gestures. It was all friendly conversation to anyone and everyone. “It’s a beautiful day! But then every day is beautiful! Because the world is an amazing place and we should all be grateful to enjoy it? Did you know today is the summer solstice! I don’t mean the parade, that was last weekend…”

And on and on.

Having had to share the bus with a few true crazies or simply belligerent anti-social types, I know it could have been worse.

And It’s more than a bit sad that he didn’t realise that by nearly shouting his non-stop friendly banter to everyone, that he’s really not talking with anyone.

Talking in code

life,

If we blog about our lives, we inevitably share information about other people. Usually nothing terribly consequentially, but it is still not, technically, our information and ours alone to share. When we’re having a conversation with friends, no one blinks if we mention friends, co-workers, or relatives. “My Mom sent me a funny picture,” perhaps. Or “this guy I work with is always telling the most groan-worthy puns.”

All harmless, right?

But sometimes something that seems just amusing and/or unimportant to us may be highly embarrassing to the person we’re talking about. An off-the-cuff comment might make a few friends laugh, or it might ruin someone’s job prospects.

Corporations tend to be more cautious about that sort of thing, which is why we occassionally read stories of people being fired for something they tweeted or shared on Facebook.

Long before those services became ubiquitous, I adopted the practice of referring to my place of work by a code name. Even then leaving out details, always discussing things in generic or abstract terms. I ofent described my work load with juggling metaphors. Heavy workload with tight deadlines and/or a lot riding on the success of the projects, and I’m juggling chainsaws, one or two of which may have time bombs attached. A lull between major projects where I’m doing lots of project clean up or administrative stuff with one or two tiny things on deadline, then I’m juggling a few bowling pins, rubber balls, and a knife.
Continue reading Talking in code →

Doin’ the cleanin’

life, ,

Few of us enjoy doing housework. No matter how necessary we tell ourselves it is, we’d all rather be doing something more fun or interesting.

Some of us aren’t very good at it. I don’t mean we’re not good at making ourselves do it, but that we don’t seem to be very efficient at it. For example, in the time it takes me to unload and reload a dishwasher, my husband can clean the stove, clean the table, hand wash most of the dirty dishes, and mop the floor. It’s like he has a superpower. He just moves so quickly.

On the other hand, afterward, neither of us can find half the dishes he put away. Continue reading Doin’ the cleanin’ →

Identities

life, writing, ,

It has not been a fun weekend. Friday morning I was rudely shoved out of denial1 that I was sick. The sinus headache that woke me up before the alarm went off was so excruciating, I had to put an ice pack on my head2. I had a deadline, a document that needed to be in a draft suitable to email to a person responsible for training some customers by the end of the day. So I couldn’t take a sick day, I needed to work from home.

Many of my work projects can be handed off to colleagues in my department, but this one isn’t one of those. I started out in technical writing without formal training in the field. Oh, yes, I’d had lots of writing, communication, and journalism classes, as I kept changing majors. And I’d been actively writing (and studying writing) since I’d made the decision when I was six to be a writer34, but I was hired as employee number 6 in a small startup. Tech writing was only one of my duties, and I approached it by asking the question: if I had to use this, what would I want to know? Then I played with the software and the hardware until I knew everything5, and wrote it up.

When we started hiring people with prior experience in tech writing (as the company grew), I learned that many tech writers were very uncomfortable writing about hardware, for instance. And if they had their druthers, avoid understanding programming logic altogether. To be fair, in well designed consumer products, users should not have to understand programming to use the product. But many of the products I’ve supported over the years have been enterprise, server-side applications and the platforms and hardware they run on. My users are usually administrators and installers, not end-users.

The upshot of all this is, within every tech writing group/department6 I’ve been in, I’ve been the hardware guy. The person assigned to write installation guides and the other super-techie docs no one else wants to do. This product is one of those.

And we’re still in the process of changing our production tool. I and the other Principal Tech Writer are still configuring the new repository, stylesheets, and support tools while we’re working. And this particular deliverable type is not fully defined and developed. So I’m also having to work on that end at the same time. All with an insanely short delivery time.

In addition to being the hardware/operating system/programming guy, I’m also the fix things guy. If I had a dime for every time a co-worker has said, “If you can’t figure it out, I don’t know who could” when we’re talking about software misbehaving, I could retire to the Bahamas.

That’s really just another manifestation of my study-it-until-I-understand-the-inner-workings trait. While in an ideal world, a user shouldn’t need to understand programming logic to use a consumer software product, in the real world, understanding that logic can help. Particularly if you can also grok the fundamental paradigm of the product7, you can figure out how to make it do things the designers didn’t plan on, and you can diagnose problems they never anticipated.

Related to that, I’m always the one who figures out how to use new systems, implement them, stretch them to meet our needs, and so forth.

I like doing all of these things. I like explaining. I try to teach my co-workers how to do all the things I do. Tasks that they have to do frequently they learn. But there is always a lot of stuff that folks only vaguely remember I showed them. And the whole “think like a programmer” or “think like a troubleshooter” thing seems to be something you either have a knack for, or don’t.

Which means I’m always going to be “the only one who knows how to do that” guy.

And that’s not fun when you get so sick you have to cancel the monthly writers’ meeting and the game I run, but you still have to squeeze in work from home time to make the deadline.

Footnotes

1. These symptoms are just hay fever because we’ve had really high pollen counts

2. And took cold tablets and went back to sleep for a bit…

3. I asked Mom where books come from, and she found a great explanation of the publishing industry in some sort of kids’ encyclopedia during our next visit to the library, and I was hooked!

4. And I made my first fiction sale at the age of 16, so I was a pro long before I got into tech writing.

5. Relatively speaking. It also helped that my other duties included testing the software and hardware.

6. Although I worked at one company for over 20 years, over the course of that time I had 6 different supervisors, as the company grew, shifted direction, grew some more, shifted direction, was split in two, et cetera.

7. For instance, the paradigm of the now nearly-gone word processor, WordPerfect, was the typewriter and how a typist used it. Text and commands for formatting are processed linearly, much like a mechanical typewriter. The paradigm of MS Word, on the other hand is a mutated cascading stylesheet8.

8. Yes, I know Word has been around longer than CSS. Of course I do. I’ve been using Word (and supporting other people using Word) since before Microsoft released Windows. But that’s the paradigm9.

9. Mutated. Because while it gives the illusion of having taxonomic behavior, it also works as a reverse taxonomy, and occasionally as a non-Euclidean hierarchy. But that’s a story for another day.

I clutter, therefore I am

life, ,

The uncluttered don’t understand why clutter doesn’t drive the cluttered crazy. The truth is that it does. Trust me, we are as annoyed about it as the most obsessive-compulsive neat freak you can imagine. But there is a balance. Sometimes what looks like clutter to you is simply a spacial filing system. Things pile up on my desk precisely so they will be there when I need them, for instance.

Virtual clutter has been driving my craziest lately. I have too many podcasts. When too many unheard podcasts pile up on my iPhone and the free space drops too low, the phone starts misbehaving in small ways. Most of the symptoms are extremely minor—the wrong cover art is displayed while playing music, for instance. Some are a bit more annoying.

The obvious solution is to delete the old podcasts that I’m obviously never going to listen to. That takes time, and ca only be done, under the current software, at my computer. Until the annoying symptoms happen, my only indication I have of the impending problem happens when I synchronize the phone with the computer–which is almost always when I’m on my way out the door to catch a bus to work. In other words, when I’m rushing and short on time.

The next solution is to drastically reduce the number of podcasts I have my computer fetch for me. Obviously I’m not listening to a lot of them, right? Except I can’t predict in advance which ones I won’t get to. I listen to a small number of news podcasts each work morning on my way into work. I listen to the others very sporadically at work. I can only listen to talking people while doing illustration or design work, or if I’m working on some of e more design-ish or programming-ish tasks in the information architect side ofmy job. If I’m actually writing, editing, or reading specifications and such in prep for writing, I have to have music, not talking podcasts.

So some weeks I listen to no podcasts at all during work.

Then there are the times when I queue up a podcast, such as the most emailed stories on NPR, and the stories are things I just do not care to listen to. Or it’s a story I’ve already heard about or read about more than I need to know, so I go looking for another podcast to listen to, instead.

I’ll keep muddling along like this for a while longer, I’m sure. Yeah, I will probably explore some ofthe alternate systems that substitute streaming for downloading in advance, but I suspect the virtual clutter will manifest in new ways on the device.

At least there will always be tidying to keep me out of trouble, right?

I love the rain

nature, ,

I love grey, wet days like today. Why, yes, I am aware that makes me a freak in many eyes.

I don’t care.

The rain is not coming down in buckets. We get that sometimes. Rain coming down so hard that the “rainchill” (cold raindrops hitting you and each absorbing a bit of your body tempature, dozens or scores of large icy cold drops every second) making you shiver and worse. I grew up where 25 degrees below zero Farenheit was neither unheard of nor uncommon, so I know from cold, and I don’t like the rain when it comes down like that.

This morning it was just a nice, gentle shower. Cool, chilly, even, but not cold. And not coming down so hard that I would have been annoyed if I hadn’t had a hood on my coat to pull over my head, but just exactly hard enough that I was glad for the hood.

It was a light enough rain that the sparrows were flitting from tree to tree rather than seek shelter. Crows and gulls shrug off all but the heaviest rain, but sparrows are a bit more delicate. They were out today.

The clouds were not dark, just a soft, cool grey. There was barely any wind.

I love the soft sound the rain makes. I love the steady hissing hum of the tires going by on busy streets. I love the smell of the air. It’s different that the wonderful smell after a rainstorm, but ther are hints of that coming scent in it. I love the sound the occasional larger drops make when they tap my hood or hat. I the way everything turns greener and greener as winter receeds and the spring rains transform our world.

I love the rain.