Out of Habit, Purely

Over the years, I have signed up to receive numerous emails about open technical writing positions. For a lot of the dozen years I worked in Cedar Rapids, I was on the look out for the perfect moonlighting gig. For a lot of years, I had that gig - it was documenting a "Horseman's Income Management and Record Keeping System." I wrote the online Help, first in WinHelp, then converted that help file to HTML, as well as a PDF of the same content. The last time I updated the documentation for this product was 2/8/2010 so, like my main employer for a dozen years, it has been a long time since the documentation for products I wrote about have been updated.

I think about all this when I saw an ad for a technical writer at a company I worked for - the hellhole company I don't mention by name. This is what was in my inbox yesterday from one of those "jobs" emails:

I just smirk when I see that. The actual job is not the one I did. It's for the job that a former co-worker did. I did software documentation and this job is more hardware-only documentation. I did a little of it and it was not all that much fun.

I think about how fortunate I am to be where I am in all areas of my life. This weekend is the College Friends Get-Together in Cedar Falls. Like last year, we are going to go see Karen's brother's band play at the Hub tomorrow night. I am looking forward to it.