Twenty Years

I spent some time this AM reflecting on the ups and downs of my career earlier today? It's my 20 year anniversary of working as a technical writer. Twenty years ago today, I had an interview @ 8 AM at a company that does not exist by the name it had in 1995. By noon, I had signed my job offer letter. Starting salary? $18,000. Only 5 permanent employers over 20 years:
Job # 1 was 3 years
Job # 2 was 7 months, 2 weeks, 6 days - Left there after 3 years to go to a place that had $ issues and by 10/1/98,
Job # 3 was 12 years
Job # 4 was 6 months, 5 days
Job # 5 has been 3 years, 8 months, 1 week, 3 days

I hated Job #4. I don’t talk about it much even though I’ve bitched about that place elsewhere on this blog. My co-worker - the senior member who was a b*tch - made me write:

From File, select New....

Why? The menu option under the File menu was, yep, "New..." and the doc had to match the UI exactly. When I asked her whether to use one or two spaces after a period, she said to me, "Use one unless it looks funny; then use two."

She also thought that it was better to manually type the TOC for a 150ish page user guide and print it out iteratively as changes were made. When I suggested implementing styles into the tool we used (her choice was InDesign, probably because she came from the Marketing dept years before I arrived.), she declared that it looked too complicated. InDesign was not even close to being used "properly" - it was essentially a Word doc in Normal style with manual formatting applied. There was nothing that was being done in those awful docs that couldn't have been done better (and faster) in Word.

I am happy where I work; I look forward to a long career here.