I got laid off recently, October 11th, to be exact. I won’t mention where I worked, not only because I signed a lot of paperwork in which I promised not to carry tales, but also because it simply doesn’t matter where I worked; I could have been working for anyone.
For 15 years, I was a cubicle rat, a word drudge. I worked for “the man” for too little pay and not enough vacation, and regardless of the company, still came away with the same scars and battle-wounds.
Over the years, within each company, two things typically occurred which would send my brilliant technical writing career on a downward spiral. The first was the constant shift of managers and desk locations, the second was the lack of effect my work seemed to have.
The change of managers was bad enough, because the new manager and the old manager never saw eye to eye and certainly didn’t have the same idea of what projects would align with the company’s goals, that is, if they were even aware or cared about those same goals. Nope, all the new managers (most of them anyway; there were a few good ones) that I have ever been shoved under, all they cared about was enforcing their own plan.
Which meant, always, that they would ignore all the work you ever did under a previous manager. It was as if you’d just spent the last two years (or two months, whatever the replacement cycle had become) wasting your time. Everything you (me) ever created, wrote, formatted, designed, organized, discussed, got tossed in the nearest recycle bin.
Then you had to start all over again, and not only that, but your sense of helplessness and futility was enforced by the latest manager screaming a song based on the newest and latest slogan (which was just a variation of the older one), that you were suddenly supposed to get very excited about. And not only that, you are asked to believe it.
As for those cubicle changes, I never understood the point. Some managers wanted you with those folks who did the same thing you did, in my case, technical writers. Other managers (and at some level, corporations) wanted you with people who were working on the same project as you were, even though those same projects would one day come to an end and require yet another cubicle shift. Still others simply shifted you because they were under the impression that spending millions of dollars moving people around for no particular reason proved that they were making progress, and making the company strong! Now I ask you, in this day and age of instant messaging, faxes, e-mails, cellular phones, wireless, the internet, and video conferencing, why on earth does it matter where you sit?
To begin with, the shift of managers and desk locations would always start off slowly, but soon became as frenetic as a methamphetamine-fueled line dance, with the office manager making the call: “Change your manager, do-se-do, now change your cubicle and don’t go slow!”
As to the second thing, the part about being a tech writer, I went in to this profession knowing that my name would never appear on anything I did. That, for the most part, what I wrote would never be read. I mean, have you ever bought a computer, for example, and actually read the owner’s manual? I never have and that’s even as I worked for a variety of software companies. No, my job as a tech writer was to create documentation as a historical record of how the software was designed to operate. And, for the most part, I was happy with the work and proud of what I was doing.
But, as I got further and further away from those companies who understood what a tech writer was and why they were valuable, I felt tasked to instill the idea that things should be consistent and readable. Like say, how the company name was written, or that when providing documentation that it should not be written in ALL CAPS. Or that having every other word in BOLD and RED was simply overkill. Some folks listened, but for the most part I was shouting in the wilderness. I was a prophet of one and no one was interested in my religion.
I preached about the difference between a possessive and a plural. I sung praise-songs about ordered lists vs. unordered lists. I sermonized about consistent formatting and how to use tags. But alas, my church held only one or two believers, and they were already saved so I was, in essence, preaching to the choir. I began to feel that my work was never being utilized (beyond a very narrow scope), and eventually, after many manager and cubicle changes, I was relegated to merely formatting and told to “make it look pretty.”
With all I knew about documentation design and layout, with my skillset developed over 15 years, not to mention the huge chunk of my brain devoted to the history of the English language, this rankled. To me, it seemed tantamount to asking Super Nanny to babysit a stick. The stick never moves, you see, and Super Nanny’s talents go to waste. So you can see why I was at the end of my rope.
Luckily, where I worked, layoffs were on the horizon, and I had a hopeful feeling that it might be me. Because, as you might guess, all the years I worked as a tech writer, I dreamed of having enough time to write, but work kept taking huge bites out of my day. I wanted to write not only because it was what I did, but also because it was who I am, who I wanted to be. So I prepared myself mentally for the day, and tried to prepare those I worked with for my departure at the next layoff. “Oh,” they said, “it’ll never be you!”
But, praise the vibrations of the universe, I got “the” e-mail, and amidst some teary-eyed and some outraged co-workers, I danced to the meeting room and practically grabbed the “this is you being laid off because we are more concerned about the bottom line than we are about keeping you employed here” folder. Then, when HR finished with their speech (poor HR, they had to go through so many of these types of meetings), I flung open the double doors to the lobby and said, “Me first! Who wants to escort me out of the building!” Actually, I think I shouted it.
Naturally, the only person willing to do this was one of my congregation, who not only understood the value of my skills, but applauded it. As she walked me out she said, “I want to read your book.” “Well,” I said to her, “so do I.”