I’m not sure if I should post after MLS, because we both have good news.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Most Annoying Person In the World, (who I will now start calling Jane because I’m lazy), never uses her inside voice except when she’s talking to herself. This alone is enough to make me hate her. Another habit she has is that anytime she has a brainfart, she has to screech her question/problem “WHAT IS BOSS’S NUMBER!!!”, “HOW DO I SCAN TO EMAIL!!!” and so on.
I have had a lot of temporary people over the years, so I’ve made cheatsheets for everything. I know that box tossing sounds simple, but there really is a lot of detail work. My cheatsheets have been refined over the years, mostly because people who used their cheatsheets would ask about something I had forgotten, I’d apologize for forgetting, tell them the answer and pull up that document and add it.
Listening to Jane screech her questions would make me grind my teeth as I told her for the 97th time that boss’s number is 1234.
Yesterday, I finally figured it out. Everytime she would screech her question about something that I know is on her cheatsheet, I’d say “Oh, no! Did I forget to put it on your cheatsheet/phone list?”, get up and walk to her desk while saying “Let me look so I can write it down for you”, lean over her shoulder to the list taped on the wall, run my finger down it, then say something like “Oh, there it is. I am really happy I didn’t forget to give this to you.”
About 3 today, she spun around in her chair to screech into 10 feet between us, then turned back around and looked at the cheatsheet, then continued with what she was doing. I’m so proud!
That is one of my least favourite traits in co-workers - people who find it so much easier to ask someone else than take notes or look at a manual or figure it out themselves. That’s a really good way to handle it, flatlined - I’ll try and remember that for the next time I’m working with someone who thinks I’m their personal manual for everything.
Ah, a well-done ISO9000 implementation. They’re so rare! But they’re wonderful.
In my case, the worst offender for several years was my ex-boss, Jude (I’d been promoted), and his most frequent question was in page 14 of the Boss’s Handbook. After I’d politely and brightly pointed out “oh, I think that’s in your manual, let me check… yep, page 14!” three or four times, the lab workers would say “page 14, Jude!” any time he started complaining about not knowing how to do something
I don’t know. I ask a lot of questions of people about things that I technically could figure out. The reality is that if the question takes me less than five minutes to ask you and get an answer but saves me two or more hours, I am going to ask.
The people who WON’T ask ANYONE ANYTHING are the ones that drive me insane. In my department we have two of them. The rest of us work as a team bouncing questions and ideas off each other frequently and get a TON of stuff done.
The other two? Spend DAYS trying to figure something out, still can’t and when they finally do break down and ask, it’s something that one of us can answer/do iy in a few minutes. Makes me stabby.
I guess you have to find the balance for that; what flatlined has described is what make me annoyed - people who don’t want to use the resources they’ve been given because they’d rather just ask someone. If you’ve got a procedure and you’ve followed the procedure and you’re still stuck, ask away. If you haven’t done due diligence and just ask over and over again, that gets annoying.
Thanks for giving notice, Guy-Who’s-Going-To-College-As-A-Mature-Student. Unfortunately for us, it was only 5 hours notice, and it was delivered at 5 in the morning. And it wasn’t sent to me, your boss. Nor was it sent to my boss. No, it was sent to *her *boss – who was on vacation. Good thing she just happened to be up early that day, checking her e-mail. Otherwise we would have assumed that you were running late. Or maybe not going to show up.
Like the day before you quit. Did I happen to thank you for that as well? Well, thanks for letting me know the day before that that you were going to be a little late the following day. Thanks also for calling me in the morning to confirm that you were waiting on a package, were tracking it online, and knew that it was on the truck, out for delivery. When you weren’t in by noon, I assumed the blame could be laid on FedEx. When we called you at 3 and you didn’t pick up the phone, my boss and I figured maybe you weren’t going to make it in that day. Little did we know the package you were waiting on was a loan pulled from your 401k – one which you didn’t mind taking out, because YOU’VE KNOWN FOR WEEKS AHEAD OF TIME THAT FRIDAY WAS GOING TO BE YOUR LAST DAY BUT JUST DIDN’T FEEL LIKE TELLING US ABOUT IT. Was this your last act of defiance? A giant finger in the face of your employeer for the last 4.5 years? The ones that paid you a higher rate than anyone else in your workgroup because of your unique skills? We gave you bonuses and recognition to the point where your workmates were getting pissed off at us – and you couldn’t be bothered to have the grace and dignity to not have us scramble to fill your position?
Good luck in your college career. You know, the one you’re resuming after 10 years. Oh, sure, you went to the same school before and had incompletes in all your classes and that’s why you dropped out. Maybe you can do it now, though, seeing as you have such a wonderful character.
We had something similar happen at my work a week ago. Our overnight lady is down for the count with serious health issues right now so a new guy was hired to take her place. New guy called the relief overnight guy last Friday at 3 a.m. to tell him he wasn’t coming back. Then he called Detailed AGM sometime between then and 8 a.m. to say that he would consider coming back if he could have Wednesdays and Sunday mornings off. Detailed AGM told him to pound sand and promoted the new lady they had just hired to the regular overnight position.
Bragging here…my procedure manual is a thing of beauty. Screenshots and step by step directions of doing everything from logging into the various programs to using the work-arounds that nobody knows about. Heck, I’ve even got pages in there to explain how to unjam the various printers, scanners, the copy machine and the shredder. There are lots of pictures.
When I was writing it, I would get someone who had not every used the equipment to follow the instructions. When they got confused because I wasn’t clear, I would edit that part and find another innocent guina pig.
This is fine. I encourage people to ask questions. If I’m teaching someone how to do something complicated, I will happily go over the process as many times as they want and give them the above mentioned procedure manual pages so they can take their own notes. If they only want to know the process, that’s fine. If they want to know why its done that way, I will explain in as much detail as they want.
Its when someone who has to call the same number every day and doesn’t bother to look at the cheatsheet, but asks what the number is everytime that I get impatient.
This annoys me as well. Usually, I can tell what someone is doing and I can tell by the body language when its not going well, so I will ask if there is a problem.
Dear heart, you’re a technical writer. That’s what we do, although generally we’re learning the thing we’re documenting as we go along. If you get tired of slinging boxes, look into taking a class or two and a career change. At least there are no rats!
Flatlined, when you move to Dallas TAKE a copy of your manuals. If you ever do want to make a career jump having evidence of your past accomplishments can only help.
How lame is it that “no rats” is a good reason to change careers?
How can you really understand the process if you are just learning it? I’m not being snarky, this is a serious question. I know all the ins and outs of my systems, the user manuals make me all stabby at times. Especially the one that was bound backwards.
How can you let it go after its done? I’m constantly updating stuff because the procedures change or I’ve found shortcuts and workarounds.
That is a wonderful idea, thank you. This is the third manual I’ve wrote, I never thought to keep a copy for new jobs.
I like writing them. I’ve been in jobs where its “jump in the river and learn how to swim” and don’t want to do that to people. As you noticed, I’m proud of my work.
Bill has been passing my resume around to people he knows because I don’t want to work in his company. Not that its a bad company to work for, but because I want people to listen to me because I know what I’m talking about…not because they think I have the job because I give good blowjobs.
You read everything already available. When possible, you get your hands dirty with it. Most of the writers I know are like me, we don’t back off on that point. We need to work with whatever it is as much as possible, or we need to shadow the people who ARE working with it. We get access to those people and we ask questions, as many as we can, even if we think we know the answer. In any documentation project, the writer (that’s you!) is the user’s advocate. Sometimes we’re their *only *advocate.
And believe it or not, being new to a process, or a software application, or a piece of machinery, is often an advantage. You’re writing for the person who’s never seen it before, and because you’ve never seen it before, you make no assumptions about what is and isn’t known. Nothing is known, so everything is subject to question. The hardest time in any project is when you’ve been on it a while; you have to balance the knowledge you’ve gained, that you have to pass on, against the naivete you still need in order to dig for more. Why this way, and not that? What happens if you push this button? What are the consequences of NOT pushing that button over there?
It depends on the project. I’ve been in companies where you start with one product and stay with it, so you’re always updating for the next release (I primarily work in software documentation, but depending on the hardware it is probably pretty similar). Other companies move you around depending on their needs.
It’s hard to let go of the baby, but you learn. You have to. You’ve got experience fostering kittens; frankly, I’d consider that harder. If you’ve learned to let go of the furbabies, then you can learn to let go of the words.
My college teachers called that The Grandmother Test. They said that any lab notes we took had to be clear enough for our grandmothers to be able to repeat the experiment just following the notes, without asking any questions. They could have references (“see pages 1-5 for pictures of different kinds of bottles and pots used in the lab”), but you could not take it for granted that someone would know the difference between a flask and a kitasatos (the flask is a conical bottle, the kitasatos is a conical bottle with a side arm).
So you get a request from your compliance team to modify a lookup list that denotes AML risk. Easy you think, a quick Stored Procedure update and check the Table for any constraints etc. So you open the .NET Windows Form code to check there are no business logic dependencies in the GUI and you see this :mad:
Public Sub PopulateAMLMatrixCodes(ByRef aCombo As ComboBox)
aCombo.Items.Add("To Be Assessed")
aCombo.Items.Add("Low")
aCombo.Items.Add("Med/Low")
aCombo.Items.Add("Medium")
aCombo.Items.Add("Med/High")
aCombo.Items.Add("High")
aCombo.Items.Add("Not Applicable")
End Sub
The thing is, the end user might be completely familiar with everything referenced. Or the end user might be someone who has never encountered this technology before. Or the end user might not be familiar with this generation, or this brand. When I was trying to get my XBox 360 to work, the CSR assumed that I had played with an XBox before, and also that I had friends who had XBox 360s that I could try my peripherals on. And he had no idea what to tell me when I told him that I was a woman in my mid 50s who didn’t have friends who played on XBoxes. I kept saying “back up, what is <word or phrase>?”, because he kept assuming that I knew a great deal more about this device than I actually did. I finally got my answer here, on the SDMB, rather than with XBox tech support. So I guess I do have friends who have Xbox 360s…it’s just that we don’t live in the same area.
You can say what you want about CS scripts (and I have, many times) but at least the scripts will assume that the user really has no clue…and sometimes this is correct. Being clueless isn’t always the same thing as being stupid. Everyone has to begin learning somewhere. It’s when a person can’t learn even after several repetitions of the same lesson when it starts getting into stupid territory.
– This is a change in the code. martu might not have the rights to change the code, only the database.
– Even if martu can change the code, there may have been other changes to the code since, meaning that they’d have to test all the changes in order to fix this little thing.
– This is less grrr-worthy, but it’s not best practices to hard code values like this. Put it in a table, or an external configuration file, or at least a configuration module.
What Ludovic said, it is a design decision that creates a huge overhead if the list has to change. In a perfect world I would only have to release one update to a data table which could be done at any time and require minimal testing. Now I have to
[ul]
[li]Update the database to add the list, new table and lookup procedure, as it should have been done[/li][li]Modify the software to read from this list[/li][li]Create a script to update the database[/li][li]Create a software release package[/li][li]Test the new software[/li][li]Arrange a release - the software will be offline for 10 minutes, people may have to reboot etc[/li][li]Buy cake[/li][/ul]
and as it has the magic AML (Anti Money Laundering) words in the request it gets top priority.
