Not Worked Up

I love my job.

My goal is to retire doing the same work I have been doing at my employer since 5/31/2011.

That said, I have a responsibility to my family.

There was a company-wide meeting on Tuesday.

Paraphrased, "We don't know the details, but we know we are going to have layoffs."

Thus, when an open Senior Technical Writer position came into my inbox because of pre-existing job alerts, I really had no option.

I do not want to leave where I am.

I do not plan to leave where I am.

Sometimes, though, there are things that happen in life that are unexpected. This open position would potentially be a short enough commute that I could potentially ride a bicycle to, if I were in shape and if I had a bicycle frame that fit my frame. It is doing technical writing in an area I have never, ever, been exposed to (policies & procedures) and, frankly, after nearly 20.5 years of writing software documentation, maybe the entire "what does the user really need to know?" and words on the user interface like "Unextract" and "Adjudication" that don't often seem more than jargon, perhaps it is time to change course. My goal used to be that I wanted to retire in 19.5 years. That said, I am certainly open to working longer if the job I am doing gives me energy.

Make no mistake, what I do now gives me energy. In the broad sense, I see the way in which I do my work as primitive compared to the ideas peculating in my brain. I see a method to our work where there is ZERO copying and pasting text between two different pages. I see an approach to the work I do where our content, our words, are treated like modular code is treated by a developer with variables to adapt to customer needs. Of course, I do not have the knowledge, today, for how to do these grand ideas, but these ideas give me energy. I downloaded a 200+ page PDF file about modular software development. I want to learn the nuts and bolts of the content in that PDF and implement its concepts into my technical writing work.

Frankly, that applies whether I am writing software documentation or policies and procedures. I'm beyond being able to accept "copy and paste" and using Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I to control formatting or manually setting other text attributes like size and indent. I want to construct the content so that it is not manual intervention that is used to control things like that. That's what technical writers did decades ago when it was the only way to do work. This is 2015. I'm ready to bring the work I do into the current year, even if I don't know the mechanics - today - of how to do it.

That's why today, on Thanksgiving 2015, I need to stop writing so I can go to 9 AM Mass. It's 8:28 AM now and I've not showered.