Confessions of a Docoholic

By Natalie Dyen
Published in InterCom, the Magazine of the Society for Technical Communications

Natalie. Hello, Doctor. My name is Natalie, and I'm a hopeless docoholic. I work as a technical writer. I like what I do, and I get paid an excellent salary.

Doctor. So what's the problem?

Natalie. You're a doctor. You've got respect. You've got initials after your name. What do I have? Lots of deadlines and no respect. When I'm at a cocktail party and I tell people what I do for a living, one of the following happens:

• Their eyes glaze over.
• They tell me they'd rather watch the Birdseed Channel or clean their toilet bowls than do what I do.
• They ask me whether I'm being punished
• They tell me how they read the manual for programming their VCRs and ended up melting their toaster ovens.

And, God help me, I even speak in bulleted lists.

D. What bothers you the most?

Natalie. The glazed eyes. Indifference is the most insulting form of…doctor, doctor!

D. Huh…Oh, most interesting. Go on.

Natalie. Some people treat documentation as the lowest life form in the software development food chain. On my last job, when my expert users saw me coming to ask them questions, they would fake a nosebleed. And programmers often treat me like I'm Pinhead from the planet Nitwit. Last week one of them explained drag-and-drop to me.

D. How does that make you feel?

Natalie. Like a glorified secretary. In fact, people in software development often confuse "technical writer" with "word processor". When I managed a documentation department, the head administrator couldn't understand why I wouldn't allow one of her administrative assistants to fill a technical writing slot in my department. I asked her whether the assistant could write. "Of course," she huffed. "Ellen knows WordPerfect AND Microsoft Word."
D. If things are so bad, why do you stay in the profession?

Natalie That's the sick part, doctor. I love what I do. I learn something new every day. I get to play with cool software. I create order out of chaos. They pay me a good salary. And the job offers keep coming in. Apparently there's a great need out there for my skills.

D. Go on.

Natalie. I get paid to spend my days reading and writing: Think of all the graduate students who pay thousands of dollars to do the same thing. And those programmers may think they're smart because they know all the answers, but I'm even smarter because I ask all the right questions, just like the contestants on Jeopardy and the people who use our software. My official title may be technical writer, but I get to wear many hats on the job. QA tester (they make it, I break it), foreign language expert (Geek to English), and chef (even hostile reviewers respond to double chocolate brownies). And even though my colleagues try to ignore the documentation, they know that the software can't be released without the doc. So I'm a key player.

D. Well, our time is just about up. It sounds to me like you've got the ideal job. I'd advise you to keep quiet about what you do in order to minimize competition. And whenever people make snide remarks about your profession, tell them they ought to have their heads examined.

Natalie Zellat Dyen
dyenn@yahoo.com