wshaffer

I really ought to have a better answer to the question, "Why did you become a technical writer when you could have become something useful to society like a doctor or a scientist?" but thankfully I don't get asked it all that often.

I do fervently wish that everyone who says this to me gets an impenetrably cryptic manual with every significant software and hardware purchase they make in the next year.

Having surveyed what I accomplished at work yesterday, I have come to the conclusion that we'd have been marginally net better off if I'd just stayed home. Memo to self: next time you begin the day by running over your gym clothes, just call in stupid.

Fortunately, today is off to a better start.

Was just in a meeting where someone used the phrase "robbing Peter to pay Paul", and then immediately amended that to "borrowing from Ganesh to pay Shiva." Which, as far as I can tell, doesn't seem to be an expression in general use. Did make me wonder if there are any common idioms for this concept that aren't based in a Christian context.

This video illustrates an interesting example of how some of the biggest software usability improvements can come from really simple ideas. One of the persistent annoyances about the old vSphere Client was that if you need to stop and do something else in the middle of a complicated process like creating a virtual machine, you had to click Cancel and lose all your work up to that point. The new web client lets you just pause what your doing, and it will save your work until you can come back to it. Simple, but very cool!

The first few instructional videos that I've scripted are now live as part of the vSphere 5.1 release. I'm really pleased by how these came out.

Paraphrasing an exchange that took place via bugzilla:
Developer: We need to say in the release notes that the product works like [foo].
Me: (Looks at documentation) We already say in the documentation that the product works like [foo]. Do we really need a release note?
Developer: Yes. We need to change the documentation to say that the product works like [bar], and then we need to write a release note to say that the product works like [foo].
Me: Wait, I'm confused. Does the product work like [foo] or [bar]?
Developer: It works like [foo]. But this is a regression. It should work like [bar]. Therefore the documentation should say it works like [bar], and then the user should go to the release notes to find out that it actually works like [foo].
Me: (Tries to comprehend a view of the universe in which this is a better experience for anyone) Sorry, department policy is to document the product the way it actually works, not how it should work.

I thought I should take a moment to post a bit about my trip to Sofia, Bulgaria. I have to say, it's a very different experience travelling to a foreign country for business rather than being a tourist. I actually had very little time for doing anything other than working, eating, and sleeping. On the other hand, I spent most of my time working and eating with locals. So, I came back with fewer pretty pictures, but maybe a better understanding of local culture - or a very particular slice of local culture.

But let's start with a few pretty pictures:
( The Alexander Nevsky Church )

Working in our Sofia office was interesting. The Technical Publications team there is very tight-knit. Almost all of the writers work in the same large room, at open desks without even so much as cubicle walls separating them. It's also a very homogeneous and rather young team - many of the writers went to the same high school and/or university, and the experienced old-timers are *maybe* my age, plus or minus a few years. Despite being so tight-knit, they adopted me as one of the group pretty effortlessly. It actually made me a little embarrassed - I'm not sure that we in Palo Alto are so thoroughly hospitable to team members from other sites who visit us.

I was really pleased that my efforts to learn a little bit of Bulgarian paid off in ways both expected and unexpected. The expected benefit was that it did help me communicate, and it was also very psychologically reassuring to me - I find the idea of being unable to communicate very scary.

The unexpected benefit was the amazed and delighted reaction I got from many Bulgarians when I spoke to them in their language. Even surly cab drivers would break into gleeful grins when I uttered a simple "good morning" or "thank you".

My primary resources for learning Bulgarian were the Teach Yourself Bulgarian Conversation CDs, which I played on my commute to and from work for a few weeks before going on my trip, and the free Bulgarian Survival Phrases podcasts. Neither will make you fluent, but since they do concentrate on vocabulary that is useful for the tourist or business traveller, you'll get a lot of bang for your buck. I recommend both.

Well, this is getting long, so I'll stop here. Look for a future post in which I'll talk about Bulgarian food, the Evolution of Technical Communications conference I presented at, and visiting Koprivshtitsa. With more pretty pictures!

Can I have a do-over on Tuesday? Because here are some of the lovely things that today has included:

• I accidentally blew off a meeting with an engineer because I got so caught up in working on something that I failed to notice the appointment on my calendar. Yeah. Way to look professional.


• The thing I was caught up in working on is annoyingly broken. At one point today I was reduced to pounding my keyboard and shouting, "I just want something to fucking work!" Way to look professional, part two, except that my officemate is used to me by now.


• Being sexually harassed on one of the online Fields of the Nephilim fan forums, presumably for committing the cardinal tactical error of being openly female. Or possibly I'm overreacting, and it is entirely appropriate to respond to a question inviting others to speculate about the contents of the special Ceromonies box set by posting a picture of a dildo.


• Having an hour and 20 minute meeting with my boss during which we tried to work out a reasonable timeline for my finishing all the things I'm supposed to be finishing. Which was really productive, and at the end of any other day would be quite positive and energizing. But at the end of this day, I'm sitting here looking at my nice long list of dates and action items, and thinking, "Sod this, I should have become an auto mechanic."

We just had a holiday party for the release engineering division at work, of which technical publications is a part. Said party included a "talent" show in which I performed a short stand-up comedy routine, which included the story of how I got evaluated by the school psychologists in first grade because I decided to turn in an assignment done entirely in mirror writing.

The punchline: "The psychologists said to my parents, 'Mr. and Mrs. Shaffer, your daughter is of perfectly normal learning ability. She is, however, a smartass.' Which goes to show that some things never change, because that's exactly what I expect my next performance evaluation to say."*

My manager, sitting in the audience, obligingly called out, "As do they all!" No, I hadn't prepped that with her.

I work with a bunch of goofballs. It's fun.

*I embellished slightly. What they actually said was, "She marches to the beat of her own drummer." A phrase that my parents would ritually repeat to themselves for many long years afterward whenever they found their elder daughter perplexing.

So, most of you have already seen Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith's post, Say Yes to Gay YA, in which they describe how an agent offered them representation for their YA novel on the condition that they either make a gay POV character straight or remove his POV from the book. I'd been intending to make a post about this myself, except that I hadn't thought of much to say beyond, "Really? Shit like this happens in 2011?" and perhaps to witter a bit about my current thoughts on the sexual orientation of characters in my current work-in-progress. (One of the major male characters may be bisexual. I'm not entirely certain at this point if I as the writer haven't figured out his sexuality or if he as the character hasn't figured out his sexuality.)

But now Colleen Lindsay has posted a guest post by Joanna Stampfel-Volpe, who claims to be the agent in question. And the way she tells it, she asked for the character's sexuality to be toned down because she wanted the book to be revised to target the middle-grade market, which meant that everyone's sexuality needed to be toned down; and she suggested cutting down on a couple of the POV characters, because there were too many POVs.

I'll admit, there were enough simple factual discrepancies between Brown and Smith's account and Stampfel-Volpe's that my first thought was that maybe she wasn't actually the agent in question. However, Sherwood Smith has confirmed that she is.

So, now we're left with something that illustrates one of my favorite intellectual obsessions: that human communication is complicated. The gap between what one party thought they said and what the other party heard is huge. On the one hand, it's worth noting that just because Stampfel-Volpe presents very plausible seeming editorial reasons for the requested revisions, doesn't mean that bias wasn't a factor. In this day and age, bias, particularly unconscious bias, usually cloaks itself as a reasonable objection. Just as an analogy, if you look at employment discrimination against women in technical fields, female candidates are rarely explicitly rejected because they are female. They get rejected because there's some minor gap in their technical skills that would be overlooked if they were male, or because they just don't seem like good personality fit with the rest of the team, or whatever.

On the flip side, authors obviously have tremendous psychological incentive to dismiss criticism of their work by attributing it to bad motives. Neither Brown nor Smith are noobs at this writing business, so I wouldn't expect them to fall prey to this kind of thing easily, but we all have our blind spots and bad days.

All the parties involved have asked that people focus on the bigger and important issue of gay representation in YA fiction rather than taking sides. But since the whole question of "How is it that there is so frequently a gigantic gap between what people think they say and what other people hear?" is a recurring obsession of mine, I had to comment on that aspect briefly.

As for the bigger issue: Write stories with gay characters. Read stories with gay characters. Talk about
stories with gay characters. Have I missed anything?

Edited to add: as confirmed in the comments over on swan_tower's excellent post on the subject, Joanna Stampfel-Volpe was, in fact, not the agent in question, but works at the same agency and, I guess, was privy to the discussions to some degree. Which...well, let me put it this way - if it's easy to deceive yourself about your own motivations, it's even easier to put the best possible spin on the words and actions of a colleague whose professional reputation you're defending. I'm now more certain than I was before that Stampfel-Volpe is telling the truth as she understands it, but much less certain that her account really reflects what happened during those discussions.