Do you know what makes me angry?
/by Mumpy
Do you know what makes me angry? I mean, do you know what makes me really, really, really angry?
Here is a list of just some of the many things that happened this week that really pissed me off:
- I sent an Installation Guide to QA and the one comment that I got back from the Head of QA was that one of the drawings should have straight connector lines instead of wiggly connecter lines. That was the full extent of the QA Review for this manual. I mean – Come On!!!! Wiggly connector lines??
- They released the last build to QA without bothering to tell me. I discovered this by accident and then went slightly cross-eyed and bald trying to get three documents and Online Help ready within 13 minutes and 42 seconds. And, if you are wondering, yes of course I managed it. I am Super Duper Mumpy.
- Somebody called me with a major bug that one of the new features did not turn up in a search on the pdf manual. I asked him to search for the word “the” – that didn’t turn up either. I asked him to never, ever call me again
- I kept calling my boss and he didn’t answer and then somebody told me that he went to Paris for a few days. He didn’t bother to tell me as clearly that kind of information is too complicated for a mere technical writer like me to understand.
- Had an argument with one of the PMs over a sentence. He claimed it was missing a comma – I claimed that the entire content was wrong and who cared about a bloody comma when it was wrong information to begin with. I then hit him over the head with a frying pan. On no, wait a minute, that last bit didn’t actually happen.
- Somebody complained about me that I had written an aggressive email. This made me so cross that I wrote them an aggressive email. And so it went on.
- I told my boss that I couldn’t release a manual because some of the links weren’t working. His response was that it didn’t matter because nobody was going to be looking at the manual in the first week, so there would be time to fix them. I decided that he was right, was overcome with a sense of futility, and decided to run off and join a circus.
- Some bright spark decided to write Note One and Note Two in the GUI. When I reopened the bug and said it couldn’t stay like that – a developer shouted at me that it had already been approved and I had no right to reopen it. All I could think of was The Cat in the Hat and Thing One and Thing Two. You will be pleased to hear that I continued to make a mother of a fuss until they changed it.
- One of the Manuals written in the Wonderful Word decided to die a sad death several hours before the Release. It was totally corrupt – and would have fitted in nicely with the current government. My boss would not let me pay a Word guru to fix it and insisted I do it myself – which wasted at least half a day.
- And finally, the award for the most frustrating of all companies in the Middle East this week, goes to HOT - which displayed a level of incompetence previously unknown to mankind. And if by any chance Motty from Customer Services is reading this – if you were my employee, you would be cleaning the streets of Tel Aviv for the rest of your life.
Have you read Jonathan's Bar & Grill or The Why of Style?
