Career Update

I chuckle when I think about how life has so dramatically changed both in my attitude about my life and about my attitude about my career. It is well documented on this blog that I love my current job. I really do. I get rather animated when I think about Confluence and reusing content. I can include a snippet in multiple pages and, when I update the snippet, the multiple pages are automatically updated. It is so powerful! I want to use that strategy in my Word docs as well to avoid making multiple updates to text that has traditionally been copied and pasted multiple times. We have a section in our user guides that duplicates content and, per a client, it is necessary to have that section. Therefore, I am using bookmarks and cross references within Word to automatically regenerate that section. It is somewhat time intensive to set up, but it is going to be really sweet when it is fully operational.

And it's not just using snippets and cross references in the docs I work on that makes my job awesome. Before I write about 2013, if you knew me in 1992, you knew me as a different person. I was an English major and I had a college professor. He did not like that I didn't actively participate in class discussion. To this day, I don't know why I was intimidated by speaking in class, but in his letter of recommendation for me that I had asked him to write for me, he wrote about how my verbal skills had been slower to develop. I have never forgotten his opinion of my verbal skills and it has repeatedly challenged me to be a more vocal person when it comes to my personality in the workplace. It turns out it was the kick in the ass I needed.

I thought about him when I was on the phone recently with a co-worker going over proposed changes to a user guide that a client wanted to have us make. When I explained my reasoning, I had a flashback to spring 1992 when I had to defend my term paper through oral arguments. I did so much better in 2013 and my oral defense of my reasoning for the way in which the user guide is structured and written compared to that term paper. The best part of that phone call? My opinion was respected and the majority of changes I rejected because they didn't match our department's style guide were accepted by the client. I had a good day.

Another thing that happened was I got an email from a co-worker. I've been working on completing a column in an Excel file. I am 12% complete. My co-worker emailed me to ask about my status and I had to explain that I had been working on other projects with more pressing deadlines. I wanted to write back to her that I had made more progress than 12%, but I couldn't. I thought about this Dilbert when I was writing my response.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-10-07