"Ronn!Blankenship" wrote: > > At 08:08 PM 3/25/03 -0600, Reggie Bautista wrote: > > >Working in tech support, I'm torn between wanting to yell at people "DID > >YOU EVEN OPEN THE MANUAL?!?" and thanking them for *not* reading the > >manual and thereby giving me job security... > > I've written some of those manuals, and I know that at least some users > read them, because I would get feedback when they discovered the things > that were supposed to be edited out but weren't because someone in > marketing was screaming that we need to ship a copy of the manual _right > now_ . . .
At least you weren't one of those annoying people who spends way too much time making the manual look pretty and not enough time making sure enough *content* got in -- I can remember Dan griping about the guy who was writing the manual would spend hours making the page look nice, but would miss deadlines because he hadn't got all the information into the computer before he started playing with it.
Accurate is better than pretty. Both together are nice, but accurate is more important, IMO.
Ya mean like the time at one company I wrote manuals for when the marketing department sent out a fancy full-color sales brochure for a new system with the word "mnemonic" spelled "pneumonic"? FWIW, the first time any of the actual writers saw a copy was after they had been printed and mailed out to potential customers, and when someone told marketing about it, they said that they had asked one of the programmers how to spell it. Almost everyone who knew that particular programmer knew that he was a crack programmer but couldn't spell worth a darn, as a brief perusal of the comment statements in his code would show. Apparently, though, the excuse was that it had to be sent out by a certain deadline which meant there was no time to run it past anyone else.
-- Ronn! :)
God bless America, Land that I love! Stand beside her, and guide her Thru the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam� God bless America! My home, sweet home.
-- Irving Berlin (1888-1989)
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