Re: Get your resume together

Subject: Re: Get your resume together
From: Andrew Plato <intrepid_es -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: Techwrl-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 15:11:05 -0700 (PDT)

"rebecca rachmany" wrote ...

> It amazes me how many of the requests for help on this list get at least one
> answer which advises the writer to get his resume together.Incidentally, it
> seems to me that many of these responses come from those who are independent
> contractors or contracting company owners, that is, those who don't have to
> deal with other people's inane decisions for longer than the lifetime of
> their current project.

There is a reason we became independents or contracting agency owners.

> In my experience, being a technical writer involves a great level of
> maturity and political finesse.

Oh yeah. I knew I left something at that rest stop outside Tacoma.

> In fact, just about any job requires putting
> up with a certain percentage of inane decisions by pointy-haired bosses.
> Incompetent management is rife. Why do we think that getting our resume
> together is going to make it better? The chances are high that we are simply
> going to trade our current political problems for new ones.

One of the main reasons most of us go independent is because we grow
permanently disgusted with the childish antics of bosses who deserve to be
executed for crimes against humanity.

Many organizations have literally institutionalized their stupidity. One moron
tech writer has a moron for a boss, who reports to a moron back at HQ, who must
submit a process analysis review to a consultant from Moron & Touche and
everybody has to stoop to the morons on the board schmoozing moron venture
capitalists.

All the morons stick together and suck the life out of the living.

If you're dealing with a moron - the only way you can get away clean and not
ruin your life is to run away. Morons will never learn, never wise-up, and
never mature. They will defend their stupidity to the grave. Because in their
mind, their moronic ideas are the only "correct" ideas.

Like people obsessed with FrameMaker. You can't tell them it is a clumsy tool
with a UI that was great - in 1990. In their mind the world *IS* FrameMaker and
all other things resoundingly SUCK. Only morons think this way. So you either
run from them or get sucked up into their moronic obsessions.

I am reminded of a Frame obsessed tech writer I worked with about 4 years ago.
This guy couldn't write a grocery list, let alone a useful technical document.
No matter what he did, he had to have some internationally approved process to
review, analyze, and discuss before he could possible do any work. If anybody
deviated a nanometer from his plan (which they always did), he threw up his
arms and claimed he could not work under these conditions. I remember him
arguing that he could not write these release notes in time because the
engineers didn't send him the text in his "internationally recognized" process
format.

This guy would have sucked the life out of me had I tried to reason with him.
So I just ignored him, finished the job, and left. You can't let people like
this get the best of you. They will kill you or worse - skew your perceptions
of reality so badly that soon you'll be in the same festering pit of
self-absorbtion this fellow was.

So is the answer to fire up your resume and move? Most of the time - Hell yes.
Why deal with morons? You have to look out for number 1.

Besides, the more people move around, the more business I get as a recruiter.

:-)

So get your resume together now!

Andrew Plato

Inadvertent proxy server expert: http://members.home.com/aplato


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