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.
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?”
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.
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.
• 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 ayounger 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.