Autobiography of a User Guide

It wasn’t the best of start I could have asked for. It wasn’t anything that I had against my creator, Raj. This lad could write but is he equipped to give birth to me? That was the question. Trust me, it had nothing to do with my creator in the form of a 26 year old guy with a stubborn attitude and quizzical smile. Not forgetting his ‘eventful projects; most of the times his victims were my brothers-Online Help.

Anyway, it was Monday and I believe Raj had a horrible weekend added to the break-up with his GF. He wasn’t in great spirits, and when his manager called him up, asking him to work on a TCP server user manual, Raj simply nodded. He came back to the workstation and banged his fists using the choicest of words that would make any C grade director happy. I was startled and was about to think, “Oh my God! Am I going to spend my life with a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome guy?”

Raj works as a technical writer for an MNC. He has been in the profession for sometime now and enjoys the intricacies of technical writing. He was a nice fella who dealt equally well with his friends and peers but was sentimental at times. And my concern is will be equally sentimental while dealing with me? Will he be in good rapport with my agents ‘FrameMaker’ and ‘Microsoft Word’? So much so, I said a quiet prayer to all the operating systems “Please, Please, whichever Operating System I am in please change the technical writer or please don’t function for me”. But I had a journey to do with this writer. To be honest, I found a touch of Leonardo Di Caprio’s character of DEPARTED in me.

The D-day arrived; I woke up bit late; around@ 10’O clock; clear, blue sky awaited for me. Suddenly I found someone talking, “alright, we will keep the source files in D: / and store it later in the LAN”. The voice sounded familiar. Yes, it was the voice of Raj. Raj was pretty Ok today and in other circumstances he was a demon to me. Given the various feedback people throw against him, he was a ‘I-hate-that-guy”. Anyway, I heard the beeping sound of the computer, and then the traditional tune of Microsoft Windows. The question was which authoring tool (agent) was he going to use? I had a bad relationship with Redmond’s Microsoft Word, and I was seeking a chance to take revenge for two of my brothers’ untimely death at the hand of Word. By the time, they passed away, their usage had been mainly with the system administrators, database administrators etc. Frankly speaking, I would prefer FrameMaker as I yearn to look for some stability and gain respect from my peers.

As soon as I was created there was quite a hustle and bustle with my names. Raj wanted to call me ‘TCP user’s guide’ while my boss, the client refused to bow down and looked forward to be called ‘TCP User Guide’. There were heated exchanges between the two with finally the manager Dorado Swami intervened and called for truce. During the course, I had a tete-a-tete with my peers, most of them being user guides. While the mood was upbeat some of them took a shot and mocked saying that I was going to have a bad time while others narrated their experience with Raj and said their in-laws - ‘punctuation’ made mockery. Some neighbors who had already celebrated quite a few releases and were waiting for their new releases asked me to be cautious and behave properly. Some said that I should “go in a task-centric way’ and you’ll be fine. To be honest, I was tense and waited for my master’s confirmation.

We started and the initial few days I was acquainted with a Cover Page, Legal Notice, TOC, List of Figures, List of Tables, and I was feeling quite at home with them. Raj is an avid coffee drinker and at times he will be working on multiple documents, exchanging emails, chatting and listening to songs. I am sure like most of my peers, I too didn’t have much time to understand the pathetic display of writing by Raj, but I didn’t have any other option. I thought of hiding myself in some drives, hung myself, but Raj always used to win the hide and seek race.

Anyway, one fine day I found myself in an attachment traveling to US. This was the first time I experienced a human touch. He packaged me pretty well, did a spell check, checked if the links are working properly and sailed me off to US at sharp 6 pm evening. It was a pretty nice journey and I found myself in John’s mailbox, whom I identified later to be my Reviewer. Here, John baptized me with a bit of authority calling me ‘TCP user’s manual_first draft_reviewed’. I didn’t like this approach but gradually learnt that it was a norm of my life cycle, and I had to quickly adapt to it. John had a keen eye and sent me across with his comments attached. I was now bearing a distinct RED color in India.

The next few days were spent on getting me covered up with content and screenshots. Often, there were iterations, which meant I had to view death of certain content and screenshots. But, the interesting part was that it was immediately covered by new content. Often on those days, there were client calls to be met and that meant longer hours with my client.

I felt sleepy sometimes and Raj used to suddenly wake me up. It was during those periods that I got introduced to new colleagues and friends specially SnagIT and Adobe Photoshop. I celebrated festival of colors Holi with them and learnt various things from Administrator Guide-mainly during lunch hours and weekends. Interestingly, Release Notes had a few jokes to crack and told me the company won’t be able to ship a product without my assistance. For the first time, I felt GREAT. Actually I was on the top of the world.

Work was getting day by day rigorous, and it was during one of this days Raj took me to his house. He shared a 2bhk apartment with his friends and kept me in a Laptop. During the course of the stay, I learnt quite a few things from my colleagues

• Try to have a task-centric attitude.
• Always have the relevant information for the users in simple English.
• Be direct in your tone.
• Always have a cause-effect relationship working for you.

After a month and a half of work, I was shipped to the US. And as I was leaving, I felt sad to miss all the warmth and grace that I received from Raj and my neighbors (reviewers, subject matter experts and project managers) all these days. He wasn’t a bad guy after all. I later came to know that there was a big round of celebration planned for the successful deployment of the product. Raj was appreciated for delivering a usable baby i.e. Me. In addition, they are planning to come up with a younger sister of mine.

Today I am a complimentary gift to George by his father. George studies in VIth standard and seem to be quite impressed by my features; he even took me to his school and showed it to his teacher. What impressed me was that they were taking assistance from me for certain tasks though at times someone called Jerry or Sally from Bangalore used to answer their queries. During the course of time, George stopped reading me and I got a wound as I was replaced with a new user manual. Depressed and humiliated, I found myself in a room filled with my contempories. I guess the only source of comfort was that I found myself in a room with certain user manuals. Here, I remember the last few days that I had spent with my fellow mates in India. I had a last wink.