Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Big question for this post:

Should a student in Sister Pauline Fox's World Masterpieces class who earned a C- have been able to recognize the first line in a novel that the student read in Spring 1989, a mere 33 years ago?

I admit that I barely survived my World Masterpieces class during the Spring 1989 semester at Mount Mercy College. Somehow, I squeaked out a final grade of a C- and, to that end, I will go to my grave believing that if I hadn't established a friendly relationship with Sister Pauline Fox (RIP)* during the Fall 1988 semester during my Freshman Composition class, I would have not received a C-; certainly, I would have a lower grade. Nonetheless, I earned a C- in her class. One of the novels I was assigned to read was Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I remember being passionately invested in this novel, especially (and the details are fuzzy) after reading about a dude who was just sitting at home instead of going out and finding a job. Somewhere, I have a Blue Book - what she required for her students to use for her essay exams - with an essay about that dude and no, I do not remember the dude's name. 

All of that to say that this article -The Making of Steven Spielberg - quotes the first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as a means to set the stage for Steven Spielberg's new film and it includes this link The Meaning of ANNA KARENINA’s First Line.

All of this to say that I am going to research the new Steven Spielberg new film to figure out if I want to go see it on a Tuesday night. 

* Sister Pauline Fox passed away 3541 days (9 years, 8 months, 1 week, 2 days) ago at Mercy Hallmar Care Center, which is where my Grandma Simons resided during the last years of her life. I visited Sister Fox once and I believe she recognized me. I don't know why (exactly) but she couldn't speak when I stopped in her room.

Random Bob Lived Where I Will Never Live

I used to think about earning a Master's degree. Originally, I thought I would study poetry or fiction writing, as two of my professors at Mount Mercy College - Dr. Kathryn Hall and Dr. James McClean - had earned their Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the Univeristy of Iowa Writers Workshop. When I decided that I teaching, at any level, was not for me, I thought about earning a Master's degree in Non-Fiction Writing as it made the most sense due to beginning my career as a technical writer. However, now if I ever think about earning a Master's degree, it's thinking about earning a Masters of Business Administration.

With the advantage of knowing "now" what my career path has actually been, I regret I didn't graduate from Mount Mercy College with both a degree in Business and a degree in English (or a minor in one of them). While I know that my student teaching experience has ended up shaping who I am, I know that my Minor in Secondary Education was pretty much worthless.

I can also say that whenever I used to think about earning a Master's degree, it was never in the context of leaving Iowa and living in another state. The thought of leaving Iowa was never a serious option for me.

But look at Bob. He started out his education at the University of North Carolina, moved all of his stuff to CA, to earn a Master's degree, and THEN moved back to North Carolina. Kudos to Bob and to anyone else who could do something like that. I have never lived anywhere except Iowa so the idea of living on a coast is something I will never see happen in my life. I'm okay with that, though, as my family and friends are in Iowa.

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What an Insensitive Title

Sometimes, I think the strongest paragraph of a story gets buried and is not used as the "lead" in the story. By "lead," I mean the meat and blood of an article. Am I even sure "lead" is the right phrase? No. I cannot recall if that is the term that was used in my Writing for Public Relations class at Mount Mercy College when I was an English major. I remember very little about that class, including which semester I was enrolled in it. I think it was the fall of 1990 and, to provide context, I know I took Milton & the 17th Century in the fall of 1990 because that was when I wrote the paper about how Satan could not be the hero of Milton's Paradise Lost as a way to cope with Horny Genius, the Iowa City-based band I had auditioned to play drums with in January 1990, going on a tour of Europe while I remained in Iowa to read dead authors. I only know I took Milton and the 17th Century that semester. To verify, I'd have to dig up my college transcript, which makes me sad and I don't feel like being sad on a day when I am above ground - it's a good day! I know my professor's name for my Writing for Public Relations class, I know I wrote a story about Steve, who was the Night Manager at the Spring House Restaurant. I worked at the Spring House Restaurant from 1986 - 1992 (high school and college). I faintly recall that my professor seemed to think I was a good writer, but even that is questionable. I don't recall any specific conversations with him about my writing, outside of comments on my submitted papers.

All that to say, I think the following paragraph, from the following article - The boring truth about drug deaths at festivals - should have been the lead for the article. It presents a synopsis of what you are about to read. Just by reading it, you don't know who "Alex" is or any of the particulars of the story, other than it is tragic and that there is a list of what Alex did.

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Alex’s story is tragic, but until her hyperthermic body was rushed to a medic tent, it was pretty boring. That is, to say, it was pretty commonplace. Staying at a friend’s house, taking pills, pre-drinking on the bus to the festival, vodka, Red Bull, sweating in the sun. Too many cops, too much fear, waiting until the very last moment to seek help, because seeking help would admit culpability and criminal activity.

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Use the link above to read the original story and then skim the article with the paragraphs re-ordered as I envision below.

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Alex’s story is tragic, but until her hyperthermic body was rushed to a medic tent, it was pretty boring. That is, to say, it was pretty commonplace. Staying at a friend’s house, taking pills, pre-drinking on the bus to the festival, vodka, Red Bull, sweating in the sun. Too many cops, too much fear, waiting until the very last moment to seek help, because seeking help would admit culpability and criminal activity.

“This doesn’t happen to us, this happens to some other family you read about or hear about in the news.” Jenny, Alex Ross-King’s mother.

On the morning of January 12, nineteen-year-old Alex Ross-King and her friends emptied some of the juice out of their bottles, added vodka, then set off on a bus from Central Coast to Parramatta for the FOMO music festival.

As they travelled down the highway, they “preloaded”, a rite of passage for many cash-strapped teenagers when heading to a music festival, where drink prices are often north of ten dollars a pop.

Like many other kids, they’d also organised to take MDMA. Alex had taken a quarter of a pill before boarding the bus, then another half on the bus. Drug taking can never be completely safe, goes the public health warnings, but this level of caution isn’t uncommon for those who don’t want to risk being hit with something particular dodgy. Pill testing is currently banned in NSW, despite clear evidence that it can and does save lives when offered on-site, so this type of depth charging is the closest way to safeguard yourself against the unknown evils of a pill.

When they arrived in Parramatta, Alex and her friends hopped off the bus and walked the five minutes to the venue. It was already 31 degrees, and they were all dripping with sweat by the time they arrived at the venue. Not surprisingly, the place was swarming with cops. At the same venue, two months later for the Download Festival, a whopping 68 police officers held dominion over a mere 20,000 attendees. The same festival in Melbourne, with the same number of punters, only required 38.

Alex saw all these cops and (also not surprisingly) panicked about being caught by sniffer dogs with the remaining two-and-a-quarter pills – and so she made a split-second decision and necked them. With a 74% false-positive rate, drug detection dogs are an highly-ineffective method of weeding out those holding drugs, a scary and unpredictable presence around any 19-year-old girl, even one who doesn’t have two pills on her person.

It didn’t take long for Alex to start feeling ill. She sat underneath a tree with her friends, drinking Red Bull and vodkas. “She appeared to be very intoxicated and was sweating and looking flushed,” the counsel assisting the inquest Peggy Dwyer told the coroner.

Her friends became worried, and told her to stop drinking. They then went to find water and ice to cool her down — a tall order at a music festival — but between the time they left and returned, Alex had been taken to the medical tent.

Her pulse was irregular, her breathing was rapid, and her temperature had soared to 41 degrees. She was erratic and acting combatively, clearly not of sound mind. She was given sedatives, but they didn’t calm her. She was covered in ice packs, but they didn’t cool her. Once body temperatures rise above 40 degrees, the body loses the ability to regulate its own temperature and hyperthermia kicks in. From here it’s rarely good news: blood cannot clot, bodily organs begin to fail and shut down, and fluid builds up around the brain and cannot drain, causing pressure to increase dramatically. Then the heart gives way.

By the time Alex was taken to Westmead Hospital, her body had risen to a dangerous 42C and she had lost consciousness. Ten minutes later she went into cardiac arrest. The next four hours were spent attempting to resuscitate her. At 9:15pm, as Nicki Minaj performed on the main stage, Alex Ross-King was declared dead.

Five other young people, aged between 19 and 23, died at music festivals in New South Wales that same summer, all of whom had nothing more in common than bad luck – and that they had each taken more than one MDMA pill. In the wake of such senseless tragedy, NSW Health interviewed a number of people who had also overdosed at music festivals that summer and happened to survive. NSW Health aimed to establish the reasoning behind the risky behaviour that lead to overdoses.

“A number of participants reported that their risky behaviours were driven by fear of police, including taking drugs prior to arrival at the event and avoiding the medical centre or open disclosure of substance use,” Peggy Dwyer told the court on Monday, day one of an inquest into these six drug-related deaths. The inquest will aim to prevent further similar deaths, with the relaxation of draconian police presence, and the introduction of pill testing, likely to be the main two ‘harm reduction’ recommendations offered up.

Dwyer cited the “presence and behaviours” of police and security as exacerbating the risks of drug taking. Simply put: young people holding drugs fear the police, and will take whatever drugs they have on their person, no matter the risks, in order to evade detection, arrest, ejection or imprisonment. This fear is what killed Alex.

“I expect that your honour will hear that this is done, as in the case of young Alex, to avoid being caught by police and charged with a criminal offence,” Dwyer explained.

Alex didn’t want to take three pills within 90 minutes. That wasn’t her plan. She made a split-second decision, motivated by fear. Like many people who die at festivals after taking too many drugs for their bodies to handle, Alex’s fear of arrest was stronger than her fear of a fatal overdose. At least, in that one fatal moment, it was.

Her mother’s quote, at the top of this column is a telling one. It sounds like that of any grieving and disbelieving mother, struggling to come to terms with a tragedy.

“This doesn’t happen to us”

This is the attitude of many towards such drugs. Despite recreational drug use being commonplace, it is treated as something to be hidden. When it is brought into the light, it is only under the guise of tragedy, or as evidence of wayward youth or a crumbling society. Of foolish, avoidable behaviour. It is treated as a criminal issue to be stamped out, not a health risk to be mitigated through intelligent, legally-available options and fact-based widespread public education.

Anti-drug messaging that warns of the dangers in black and white terms clearly has one effect: it makes kids ignore it, scoff at it, disregard the entire message. Because most of the time, drugs don’t kill. Hell, most of the time, illegal drugs have no negative consequences: legally, physical, or otherwise. That’s the real secret here, some people quite enjoy taking drugs and can often do so safely and without incident. But sometimes things don’t turn out so rosy. It’s a roulette wheel, but it’s one in which the odds of dying can be lessened with common-sense policy.

“This happens to some other family you read about or hear about in the news.”

<snip the paragraph that is now the lead>

At the opening of the inquest, Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame seemed to understand the banal reality of drug use.

“These are your children but they could just as easily be the children of my own community or my own family,” she said. “They could be any young people who go to music festivals and partake in drugs as many young people do.

“These are our young people … and we owe them a proper investigation of the circumstances in which they died.”

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You can have your own opinion but unless you agree with me, you're wrong.

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I'm KIDDING!!

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Negan the Anti-Hero

Today is a day on which I wish I had a portfolio of the papers I wrote for my classes when I was in college. As an English major at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, IA, I wrote a lot of papers. I know that if I had that portfolio, I could re-read a paper I wrote for my "Milton & the 17th Century" class. I do know that in my pre-10 Year Project journals, I used Scotch tape to adhere that paper to a page in a spiral notebook. Because I do not have an index or list of which volume in those pre-10 Year Project notebooks has what paper, I have to go by memory.

What I remember is this: in "Paradise Lost," the character Satan is not a hero and could never be a hero. I defined hero as someone who does something not because the person believes there is a reward or payment of some sort. Satan's motives are impure. I wrote that paper because I would not accept "Satan" as having any heroic traits. I wanted to write that paper because I thinking about the character in relation to my view that Satan is the opposite of God and that the opposite of God is awful. Thus, the opposite of God that is awful could not have a single trait that I could admire. And so, I wrote that paper with (I think) double the number of references I was required to have for the paper. I wrote with passion and fire in my fingertips as I tap tap tapped on the keyboard in my parent's basement. I was driven to prove "Satan is a hero" could never EVER be true. Period. End of argument.

One other thing I remember about this paper is that I got a B+ for a grade!

Thus, when I read this article - Negan and the problem of the Anti-Hero - I felt that same sort of fire in the pit of my stomach.

Holy CRAP!! I FEEL DUMB!!

It started with this query on 3/29/2019:

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Can I use Regular Expressions to replace this:
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<title>CTE/Voice Services/Grandstream Patient Room Phones - External Resources</title>

With this:

<title>CTE - Voice Services - Grandstream Patient Room Phones - External Resources</title>
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Since that innocent query, the amount of knowledge I've been trying to process is staggering. Every time I think about learning how to code by taking a Kirkwood class or through Lynda.com, I read something like this link on stack overflow that Chris M sent to me in his effort to help me solve this and shake my head. So much of that page goes sailing over my head! I think, “You’re a dumb English major that didn’t know what he was doing in 1994 and typed “c:\del *.*” in DOS (when I really wanted to just delete .txt files, but I didn’t know I could type “C:\del *.txt”.

Then I think about how I *know* now (today) that “c:\del *.*” was a dumb thing to type and that I have learned so much about DOS since then, by reading sites like stack overflow, by experimenting, by asking questions of Chris, Brian C, and anyone else I come in contact with via email or the Internet.

That brings me back to wanting to use that gnawing feeling of “I’m really stupid and could never learn this stuff” as motivation to do just that: learn it! Time will tell if I learn as much about regular expressions as I have learned about DOS!

I went back to earlier in the process of trying to figure this out because I thought I had seen where the command (see, I don’t even know if I call the things I’m trying to create “commands” or “expressions” or something else!) would look inside the <title> tag. That led me back to https://regexr.com/4bdf0 and guess what?

It seems to work for me. I ran it over my directory and it was working like I expected. I then replaced the <title> & </title> tags with <h1> & </h1> because I have the same type of thing within the Heading 1 tags. Preliminary results are encouraging!

I’m lucky in that I can regenerate these HTML pages any time I want and they are stored within a single directory (c:\rh\drdoc\e-r) which means if I screw something over, I simply regenerate the files and don’t paint myself into a corner by “permanently” mucking up my files.

So, crossing fingers, I think I have it!

Today

This post is about what a Championship Game Should NOT Be and the connection between the University of Iowa and Clemson in the Clemson English Department.

To begin, I watched Clemson defeat Alabama in the College Football Playoff national championship. Someone in our house asked, "Where is Clemson?" As I sat on the couch, I used my cell phone to perform a quick search using Google. I learned Clemson is located in South Carolina. While on the Clemson website, I decided to look up information about their English department. I found their Faculty and Staff and identified connections to Iowa!

1. Professor and Chair Susanna Ashton has a tie to Iowa: Ph.D. English, University of Iowa
2. Associate Professor Nic Brown has his M.F.A., University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Fiction

To read more about Clemson's English department, go here.

But back to the actual game, I can't say it was much of a game. Clemson routed No. 1 Alabama 44-16. "It was the Crimson Tide’s biggest loss under its legendary coach Nick Saban," per Fox News.


Additional information about the game and Clemson's English department:

1. Look at the muscles on the arms of the quarterback! That's impressive!

2. There was a typo on the English department's page.

Flyby Over My Head

I have NO clue if how that equation created that graph - English major here - so I'll trust it is correct.

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I Majored in English

Read this article - I’m a Software Engineer Who Majored in Psychology and English - for some ideas.

Can v. May

Standard 'language' warning applies to this video.

Grammar, Back to the Future, and Best Friends

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Burdened

From my Fox News First Daily Politics email newsletter:

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Today is the birthday of William Faulkner. Born in 1897, the Noble Prize winner is the definitive voice of the American South in the 20th century and best known for his Shakespearean portrayals of Southerners of castes high and low and both black and white in novels like “Absalom Absalom” and “The Sound and the Fury.” But Faulkner may have reached his highest heights in short stories. Faulkner despised the necessity of turning out smaller pieces to pay the bills, an act he referred to as going “whoring” and “boiling the pot.” The University of Mississippi tells the story of his short stories here.

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I read "Absalom Absalom" and "As I Lay Dying" when I was an English major at Mount Mercy College. I know I didn't care for him nearly as much as my professor...

Meh

After reading the first few pages of "Aftermath" on the Entertainment Weekly website, I'm unimpressed with the writing style. I didn't begin reading the published words from the novel that provides the missing pieces in the Star Wars Universe between "Return of the Jedi" and "The Force Awakens" to be grand literature. I purposely set aside my tendency to be snobby when I read writing. As a former English major, sometimes it's difficult to do and sometimes I fail, but I don't think it was even a factor as I read the words. The writing style is so choppy, so void of details about what the speaker sees, hears, and touches. In science fiction writing, especially the Star Wars Universe, details are the essence of what causes debates among fans of the film series and the novels that have been published over the years concerning the characters that are also in the films as well as characters that are only in the novels. My purpose is to not go into depth about what I read because there's no specific paragraph or collection of paragraphs that gave me this impression. Go read it yourself.

English Majors and Math

I earned a Bachelor's degree in English in 1992 from Mount Mercy College - it's now called Mount Mercy University - and if it weren't for Nancy Rhodes, who was my Basic Math professor, I would have less than zero confidence in my mathematical abilities. She refused to believe that I was incapable of mastering the content in her class. It took until my sophomore year of college to get through a math class without failing a single test as I am pretty sure I failed at least one test - sometimes several - in each of the previous math classes I had to take in high school.

That said, even though I maintain our bills / finances - thank you Excel for having the ability to prevent me from counting on my fingers and toes - the opening in this article about English majors and math made me chuckle.

Notes from Career Panel

I was asked by Mount Mercy University English professor Carol Tyx to be a member of a panel of MMU alumni that were English majors. The purpose of the panel was to discuss our careers. Prior to the panel, Carol emailed me a set of questions and, using those questions as prompts, I created the following content. This is a selfish post, one that specifies a lot of details about myself and my career journey. To prepare for posting my notes to this blog, I did some minor editing just because it's my blog and I can do that since I own the content.

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Career Panel Thursday Nov. 20 2:00-3:00 109 Warde

What has been your employment journey since graduating from Mt. Mercy?

Context First

I came to Mount Mercy College in fall of 1988. My goal was to be a high school English teacher. I did a semester of Student teaching in Fall 1991. I did not like teaching – stories could be told about being slapped by a student, breaking up a fight, and going through a faith crisis at the same time - what am I doing here on earth? What purpose do I serve?

To summarize, those are the “highlights” of the “Dark Time of my Life” and by the time I graduated in May 1992, I had concluded teaching was not a career for me.

Since I had gone through my college education with a focus on being a teacher, it was difficult when I realized I had no idea what I could do with my degree.

I began my job search in February 1992 and it ended 3 years later in February 1995 and during those 3 years, I applied to many companies for many positions in many cities.

During the time that I didn’t have a permanent, full-time job, many life events:

• Proposed to my wife in June 1992
  
• Married my wife in August of 1993.
  
• We purchased first house in April 1994.
  

Miscellaneous non-technical writer employment

• Telemarketer at APAC
• Temporary data entry clerk at ACT (Iowa City)
  
• Software Quality Assurance Testing at ACT (Iowa City)
  
• Got an awesome letter of recommendation from manager!
  

First Technical Writer position NDP (Cedar Rapids)

Interview at 8 AM on Friday, February 10, 1995 & signed job offer letter before noon. Words of advice: Always negotiate salary. I was offered $17,500, which was low, so I countered up to $18,000. I should have asked for more. The VP I was interviewing with said that I would have to work that much harder for that extra $500.
Two recurring themes in my career:

• Networking 
• The only reason I even knew about this company was through a friend. My wife and I had a New Year’s Eve party on 12/31/1994. Invited several friends (MMC alumni). One friend was having a “good time” and started talking about how he worked for a great company. If he hadn’t been at our house that night, I would have never known of their existence. There was never a job ad for the position I applied for.
• Focus on content. 
• Don’t rewrite or rephrase what someone tells you should be told to the end user. You should be knowledgeable about your subject so that you pick and choose those details that the user needs.

I worked there for 3 years.

Second Job: Jordan Systems

Jordan Systems had a product that was PC-based software, not AS/400.

Do not fail to value networking! Worked with a MMC alumni who lived on my dorm floor my freshman, sophomore, and junior years. Software on an AS/400 with an interface to a PC. AS/400 used to be a popular platform in the area and you could take programming courses at Kirkwood, but it has since been reduced in popularity and use (at least from my perspective).
Worked there from 2/10/98 – 9/30/98.
Working there was interesting. I had my own office, but it was a small company that had money issues. We used to sit around the lunch table and hope the mailman would bring a check from a customer so that payroll could be met. Went through layoffs – it was a choice between me and a co-worker. Part of not being laid off was the understanding that I would stop doing my technical writing duties and start doing data entry because the company generated revenue from data entry whereas technical writing was an overhead cost.

Third job: Quintrex Data Systems

There was a major life event upcoming: we were expecting our second child and financial security was a must. I sent in a resume for a classified ad in the Cedar Rapids Gazette for a QA Tester. Ad mentioned AS/400 experience a plus. Networking again! The Vice President was a neighbor from birth until about third grade, but he knows my parents and knew me. I worked there a dozen years. My first day was 10/1/1998 and I submitted my resignation on 10/15/2010. A lot of my time at Quintrex was awesome. I was the only dedicated technical writer so I .carved a niche and definitely nested. I was able to branch out into Marketing writing, User Interface design for Windows, and all sorts of other tasks like release distribution (paper copies of instructions & burning multiple CDs). My primary work was to maintain end-user and internal documentation for all their systems. There was a lot of content - multiple 500 sheet reams of paper. I requested and then was sent to conferences in Boston (2004) and Long Beach, CA (2007). I had to adapt to technology changes. The online Help was distributed in a file format called WinHelp. However, Microsoft announced that they were ending support of WinHelp with Windows Vista. This caused a conversion from MS Word to HTML.

This is an important part of my career. Why would I want to leave a good thing and go somewhere else? At the time, these were my reasons I decided to look for a new position outside of Quintrex

1. The company served the Telecommunications industry with software to landline companies.
2. CEO was 65 and refused to reveal his plans
3. There was a subtle change in company culture – documentation isn’t important.

Epilogue: After I left

1. Company was purchased by St. Louis-based NISC
2. The technical writer that was hired to replace me died from a leg clot
   
3. CEO who wouldn’t reveal his retirement plans actually retired in September.
   
4. Did on-site 3 hour training about the tools I had used to write the company’s documentation in August 2011.
   

Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa

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Editor's Note: This section, Unnamed Hellhole in Southern Iowa, is the part of my prepared notes that I didn't get to talk about during the panel. On Friday, I mentioned to a co-worker that I felt somewhat odd that all the talk on the panel was about the "good" that has happened in our careers. Sometimes, there are "not good" parts of a career. Certainly, I hope the students attending the panel never, ever, have to go through what I did. The parallels between this epoch of my life and "The Empire Strikes Back" are easy to sketch as I was definitely going through a time of uncertainty. Life was certainly bleak.

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To this point, my career had been going quite well. I had worked as a technical writer for nearly 16 years and thought I “knew” all I needed to know about this profession. Working at this place showed me I do not. Thus, I am going to tell you something that you may not hear from anyone else – there are times in life where you will realize you are in the wrong place. I consider this a misstep in my career. Swayed to leave Quintrex with false promises of building the same type of situation I had at Quintrex from the ground up and more money. Quintrex counter offered to keep me, but I didn’t even look at the number because of the above 3 reasons. Should have looked at the number. Traded security for “opportunity” that seemed like a good idea. Learned a lot about myself and my character.

• Began working there on 10/18/2010. 
• Processes in place were wrong. 
• Used a page layout app (InDesign) to maintain 100+ page user guide. ID is fine for brochures, but was the wrong tool for creating online Help in HTML. 
• Manually typed the Table of Contents, then reprinting to verify pages matched 
• Manually drew a line to margin 
• One space or two – use one unless it “looks funny” then use 2. 
• Tedious copy and paste work for other languages. 
• Stopped working there on 4/13/2011. 

Being told I was a good fit for the position has turned into a blessing in disguise. It certainly was not at the time. I had been replaced at Quintrex so I couldn't return. This was a tumultuous time in my life. I was back to searching for a job, as I had done from 2/1992 through 2/1995. I began attending daily mass at our parish. During this time, networking became key.

1. Father of a kid on my son’s baseball team came to a game with a programming language book. Started conversation about it. I hadn’t known he was a programmer. Found out he worked at where I had applied, and that since he knew my current manager, he said he would put in a good word for me.
2. Neighbor’s sister-in-law worked at my current employer, knew my current manager, and said she would put in a good word for me. She was recently reassigned to my department. My cubicle is less than 5 feet from her.
3. Fellow parish member worked at my current employer. Had known her for 20+ years. She knew my current manager, and said she would put in a good word for me.

Eventually, I interviewed with my current manager, and then followed up with HR, who told me I was the “top candidate” for the position. That thought still makes for a nice ego stroke. Job offer came via phone call during supper. When I was told what the salary was for the position, it was higher than I had imagined and took me by surprise to the extent that I didn't even try to negotiate! Always negotiate.

What kind of work do you do currently?

Software documentation

What skills are needed to perform your job?

These are ideas that are not limited to my work at my employer – spans all of career. Given: you know how to arrange words in an order that is clear and easy to read.

1. Ability to analyze and use previous knowledge to make decisions about new situations.
2. Critical thinking skills
• If you are told the system should create A, but you have never been able to create A in the system – you can only create B, what is different? What steps did the person telling you A is created take to achieve that and where are the differences between your knowledge where you only see B and the knowledge of the person telling you should be able to create A?
3. Teamwork Skills
• You have your strengths and you have your weaknesses. 
• I work on a team where my strengths (tools) and weaknesses (project management) are balanced out by others on the team.
4. Compromise
• Our department had a recent discussion about expand / collapse. This became my pet peeve issue that if you search for a keyword in the "site" search and the keyword is found and you click the search result to go to the page that the word is supposed to be on and you do a page-level search for the same word, if that word is in a collapsed section, you wouldn’t be able to find the word that your "site" search listed in the search results. We were collaboratively working on a user guide where the original design of a page had 7 expand / collapse sections and the word I was using as an example was in the seventh collapsed section. 7 user clicks to find information – making the user do more work than necessary. To go along with this, there is often more than one way to write something. Negotiating a style that you will use to make them read as if one person, one department, wrote all of the documentation.You could write:
  
• To do A, click B.
• or
• Click B to do A.
5. Philosophical differences
• There are different approaches to any situation. 
• Your experience is just as valuable as your co-worker’s experience.
6. Do not be totalitarian in your opinions and dismiss others’ opinions. 
• Who is the best writer - Shakespeare or Chaucer? 
• Often there is no right answer so you have to use the skills you gained from being an English major to analyze the situation and make a decision.

How might an English major prepare for the job market?

1. Embrace technology.
• You don’t have to own the latest / greatest gadget or use the latest / greatest Windows operating system or Mac operating system, but you should be familiar with it. I knew nothing about computers when I graduated and consider myself to be dangerous enough to think I know what I’m doing when it comes to trying to remedy laptop or computer issues.
• The trend is for companies to use social media to research you as a candidate. Your online images and words create an impression of you by people you may never meet.
2. Understand the value of a recent backup
• Consider if the device upon which you store your music collection or even your term papers for this semester were to suddenly not work. I was using my work laptop when I suddenly got an odd Windows message. The end result is that I lost a lot of data. I’ve also lost music files that were created by converting from CD to MP3.
3. Humility
• You are not the gift to writing that you think you are. You will encounter multiple people in multiple situations where what you think is “right” is exactly what they think is “wrong” and your challenge is to and Embrace that person’s opinion. Make yourself learn from that person. Adapt your world to incorporate their knowledge to improve yourself.
• Side note: In my experience, everyone thinks that they are a writer. The quip I’ve often heard is that “writing is easy. After all, it’s just typing words.” My value as a technical writer is the ability to choose the words that communicate the information the user needs and to put those words in the correct order. At every position in my career, there was always a co-worker that believed they would be able to do my job “better” than me. There is probably a person on this campus that has the same interests as you and may think they are as skilled in that interest as you are. 
4. Soft skills
• Being able to work on a team. 
• Recent Gazette article: http://thegazette.com/subject/news/soft-skills-hot-commodity-among-employers-20141019 
5. Develop good habits
• Decide that you’re going to do something at 3:30, M-F, and then track whether you follow through with doing it. 
• If you don’t follow through, analyze your motivations for not following through. 
6. Don’t be discouraged by the advertised jobs you will come across. When you go to Rockwellcollins.com or ACT.org or Corridorcareers.com, searching for "writer" or "write" will not yield many results. 
• Expand your search criteria or, perhaps, don't specify any search criteria and simply scan all available jobs. 
• There's many job titles for a "technical writer" such as "documentation specialist", "technical communicator" and so forth.

Is there anything you wish you had done while you were a student that would have prepared you more effectively for the work world?

1. Take programming classes, especially if you are interested in writing software documentation. As someone who writes about software, a basic understanding of the logic and approach to programming - what it takes to create the systems I write about – would be helpful. You can learn on your own.
2. Take a basic business class and/or accounting class. Economics, ledgers, taxes. I was in a position where I did technical writing contracts outside of regular work. Have no idea if what I did was correct or not, but I did it. <grin>
3. Spend time in the computer lab helping users solve issues with computers and software.
4. Try different things that are outside of your comfort zone. Have preferences, know what you’re good at, but don’t pigeon-hole yourself into a limited area.

 

Ebola

I've resisted the urge to write about Ebola because I was an English major and have zero medical training. All I can do is regurgitate what I hear and read in the media, hoping that the information is reliable. That said, it is one of the issues that is gripping the media headlines. Ebola is a disease that is not new to civilization, but is new to the United States. Until recently, there wasn't a lot of attention paid to the disease because in America's selfish view, it wasn't a disease 'here' - it was a disease 'over there in Africa so it doesn't impact us.' I'm not saying that is right or wrong - just documenting my perspective.

This is an article about how distraught the country is becoming: http://www.redstate.com/2014/10/26/ebola-quarantine/

If I tried to provide a daily and comprehensive list of articles about Ebola on the Internet, the list would be extremely unmanageable. Thus, I am not going to try and create one. While Ebola is a crisis in our country, I feel the need to let qualified authorities offer their opinion. I don't consider my opinion to be worth any more than the product of a trillion times zero.

Super Hero Movies

To anyone that will listen, I will say that two things in my childhood contributed to my love of reading. First, during weekly mass at St. Pius X in Cedar Rapids, I remember having the book in the pew open to the readings and as they were read, I followed along. It was like someone was reading aloud to me and by following along, I know I increased my vocabulary. The second was reading comic books. So, when I feel giddy and excited and immature about seeing the scheduled super hero movies that Hollywood is going to make here, there's definitely a source for those feelings. And what essay about comic books can begin without stating there is always a lingering sense of regret when I think about that collection and considering how much money those comic books would be worth to a collector in 2014. Every kid who read comic books believes their collection would be worth a lot of money, including me. 

I often smirk when I remember how certain things in life make a huge impression in the brain. I don't regret the time I spent reading comic books as it nurtured my innate desire to read. I do vividly remember that it was Donna Schlampp who gave me a subscription to Thor. Donna is my godmother. I don't remember the context for why I received that gift - birthday? Christmas? - but I remember being initially disappointed by her gift. I remember it was given to me with a Spider-Man comic book. I remember that Spider-Man was a super hero I knew about but Thor was an unknown hero. Maybe it was the fear of the unknown that I was reacting to in that dim memory of being disappointed.

I remember that each issue of Thor arrived in a brown wrapper. I remember I could simply slide the comic book out of that wrapper. Immediately retreating to my room to read a new issue of Thor was a monthly event. I think reading Thor made reading Shakespeare somewhat easier for me. The characters in the Thor comic book didn't say things like "I like the way the sun looks as it goes down on the horizon." Instead, their characters used phrases like "Upon the distant horizon, sets the sun I enjoy." The way the words were arranged were not easy for me to comprehend as a child but because I read Thor on a monthly basis, I learned to understand the way the characters spoke. Maybe every English major should read Thor as a way to learn how to read literature like Shakespeare? I crack myself up.

Back to reading comic books, I remember exactly where I sat when I read comics. I sat in my bedroom, on the floor, with my left leg in my closet and my right leg out of my closet. I had two sliding closet doors on a track. There was a large maroon box without a lid and it was in this box that I stored my comic books. This box was large and covered my entire closet floor. Leaning against the wall, I sat next to this box and read comic books. I can't begin to estimate the number of hours I sat and read comic books. I read Justice League of America, Thor, and many others. It is still a natural impulse to look for comic books if I am anywhere that has a magazine rack.

LinkedIn is not Better than CyberCoders

Look at the 4th job listed and tell me how an English major is qualified to be a psychiatrist? Spare me the jokes about how you must be crazy if you were an English major in college, as I was at Mount Mercy College from fall 1988 through spring 1992.

I know my dad didn't mean anything mean or negative when he said this 20+ years ago, but one time, he told me that his perception of English majors was that they are "weird" - I was flabbergasted. I didn't know what to say.

I still don't.

Garbage Truck

I have a book called "The Law of the Garbage Truck: How to Stop People from Dumping on You" by David J. Pollay sitting on my dresser in my bedroom. Sometimes, when things happen in my life, it's a good idea to revisit it. If so inclined, here's the URL to buy it: http://www.amazon.com/The-Law-Garbage-Truck-Dumping/dp/1454905182
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Even though I was an English major, I don't read a lot of books. I recommend this one, though.

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

Conversion Last, Finances First

If I kept inline with the history of this blog, I would not write the following: we are in a good place financially. For a lot of years, in order to make our bills, I would need to pull funds from a savings account. I hated doing that as I always had it in my head that our net income - what is deposited in our checking account by our employers - should be enough to pay our bills. While there are "good" and "bad" months, I'm happy to say that it looks like, for the rest of the year, I will not need to use the savings account. Of course, things change and such, but if our monthly bills "play out" like I expect, I will be very happy.

I also have to say that it is extremely ironic that I, the English major that hates numbers am the one that keeps our checking account balanced. I used to do really really poorly in math class. I had a math tutor from 7th (or 8th) grade through my junior year of high school just to get me through. It wasn't until I arrived at Mount Mercy College and had Nancy Rhodes as my math teacher that I felt like I was not an idiot when it came to numbers. I smile when I think about my reaction to actually getting an A on a math test. I couldn't believe it.

Finally, I crossed 63000 after rehearsal last night!

63009 File(s) 535,874,910,363 bytes

Brian Guitar said he was doing the same type of project - I told him I'd take his CDs!