Month: February 2009

bookmark_borderA petition arrives!

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It begins “Dear Sir/Madam,” and, being the former, I read on.

“Objection to proposed Mobile Phone Base Station (Aqua Court/Nature Trail, O2 Cell Site: 040762)”

I pause at this point. I have an O2 mobile phone, it has a crappy signal in my house, the new cell site would be up the hill a bit, off to the side of the road (not a particularly nice site either, ignore the bit about ‘nature trail’ it’s a path between two housing estates).

YES! FINALLY a better mobile phone signal. BRILLIANT!!

Then I remember that I live in a community and, perhaps, there are good reasons as to why someone would object to having a good mobile phone signal in their house. I pause and despite some serious thinking whilst I watch an episode of Scrubs (the one where they all drift in and out of a medieval fantasy, hilarious!) I can’t think of any off the top of my head. I can only surmise that, with it being 2009, if you don’t have a mobile phone you must be ‘of an age’ that views those that carry them as suspicious, communist-card toting luddites. Or hippies. Or, god forbid, a Liberal Democrat.

So I return to the missive and read on. And on. And on. I’m less than half way through the first few sentences when I give up.

I know who has put this through my door and I’m sure he means well but I’m hungry and can’t really be bothered reading it all. However I vow to read the rest of the missive later, noting that the return address is included, figuring that once I’ve done some of my OWN research I may (or may not) sign in agreement and post it off.

I do note that there is no option to disagree with the stated objection, thereby agreeing that the erection (waahey!) of the base station should go ahead, but decide to cross that bridge later.

My troubles behind me (for such things do trouble me, dear reader) I turn my attention to more timely and important matters, namely unlocking Everlong by the Foo Fighters in Guitar Hero World Tour on the Wii. I’m midway through one of the songs in the setlist (Sweet Home Alabama by Lynnrd Skynnrd if you must know) when the doorbell chimes.

I pause the song, annoyed, and stomp to the front door. Lo and behold the very man who pushed said missive through our letterbox today is back to “collect my signed copy”.

Now, I’m a reasonable man but there are a few things that irk me greatly and one is people who make assumptions on my behalf. That just makes an ass of you and an umption of me, and there is nothing I hate more than being an umption, let me tell you!

“Ahh I’ve not signed it, not sure I will to be honest”, says I, confident that’ll put the wind up the cheeky sod.

“Ok, no problem, cheers”, he says, all too cheerful. How very dare he! Not only has he made me an umption of me, but he has the gall and sheer affrontery to be cheery about it!

I am irked, possibly even miffed, by this and am left with no other option.

I reach out and grab him by the throat and, whilst squeezing his windpipe and cutting off his air supply, I reiterate my dislike of being an umption and, just when he’s approaching his final breath, I let go. He drops to the ground and I stand over him for a moment to make sure I haven’t killed the old bugger (he’s 70 if he’s a day) and, satisfied he isn’t going to die whilst on my property, consider the matter closed.

I turn and close the door firmly, but not before he’s choked out a final “sorry to have bothered you…”.

So, dear reader, I’m sure you feel my pain. It seems I shall remain adrift in a calm sea, with no mobile signal to billow my sails.

Bugger.

bookmark_borderWhen users don’t want help

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For a while now I’ve been watching video presentations from the likes of the TED and GEL sessions. Largely these are delivered by people who are at the forefront of their field or who challenge common perceptions with some unique thinking.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) sessions can be a bit random but they are always entertaining as they are delivered by people with a real passion for what they do, to an accomodating audience, by experienced presenters. It’s a good combination.

The GEL (Good Experience Live) conference is, as the name suggests, focussed on good experience. Which begs the question “What is good experience?” but there are others far better versed in giving an answer to that question so I’ll leave them to it (you may find some answers on the conference website).

It was on the latter website that I recently watched a presentation by the head of OXO (Note for UK readers: this is an American housewares company, not the makers of gravy cubes). Alex Lee, President of OXO, delivered a presentation featuring some of their products and outlined some of the guiding principles they follow, one of which he stated as:

“Helping people without the stigma of being helped”

Sound familiar? Have you heard something similar when discussing why “no-one reads the documentation”?

I think the first person who I heard mention this was Matthew Ellison at one of the Digitext Help Conferences. It was early in my career and did strike me as quite fundamental and a little bit hard to fathom. As a Technical Writer my main goal is to make the life of the user better (to give them a good experience when using the software by aiding them through those process), so to hear that there was an issue like this that blocked someone from accessing the documentation I was so carefully crafting was quite a shock.

So how do we, as technical communicators, deal with this issue? How can we help our users get past that stigma?

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this, I have a couple of ideas in mind but nothing firm. Is this something you try and cater for in your product information? Do you have any way to influence this in other areas of the product? What techniques have you deployed that help get users ‘into’ the documentation? Is there much of anything that we CAN do??

I’m off to dig about for any research into this area, feel free to leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments, or email me direct.

bookmark_borderGrumpy Young Man

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At some point, over the festive period just past, I found myself watching a TV series called “Grumpy Old Men” in which several personalities (they’d probably baulk at being called celebrities) rant and rave about the myriad of little things that annoy them; The people who talk loudly on their mobile phones, the fact that these gentlemen are quite happy to sit in silence and consider it time well spent, and how baffled these grumpy men are with an entire raft of youth culture issues.

I laughed along with a lot of the comments, heartily at first then, as the program progressed, with a slight tinge of dread for, it appears, I too am a Grumpy Old Man.

It’s not that I think I’m old (I’m 35 and quite happy with that) but I do seem to be quite a grumpy bugger.

Perhaps this isn’t a blog post I should be writing first thing in the morning, before I’ve had caffeine but … ohh actually there’s a thing. How hard is it to leave a kitchen area in a reasonable state? How selfish – or perhaps arrogant? – do you have to be to assume that it is acceptable to leave the remnants of your lunch, crumbs, tomato seeds or whatever?

Ohhh dear. I’m doing it again, aren’t I.

As you were.

bookmark_borderShortly written

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The act of writing fiction, of considering the flow and cadence of certain words, the structure and pace of a sentence, the building of a paragraph, laying the foundations for something bigger is something with which I flirt. Most of my flirtations make their way here in the form of odd and completely random blog posts.

A few people have said to me that I should consider writing something longer, bigger in scale but my attention span doesn’t really lend it to such a venture. I’ve made my peace with that as I think I’d have to quit my day job to have anything approaching a chance of writing a novel, but it’s only just occurred to me (yesterday morning) that I might be able to tackle a short story.

Now, at the risk of getting my Mother all excited (she’s my biggest fan, obv), the idea has a lot of appeal. It’s not something I’ll be able to tackle at the moment but I might do some background research anyway…

I should point out that I have the beginnings of a short story already in place, something I’ve dipped in and out of for a long time but I never really (weirdly) considered it a short story as such, more just a consistent place to enjoy the process of writing.

And no, I’m NOT going to publish that little piece of nonsense.

I know a few of you have written short stories (and a few of you have books, gasp!) so if you have any tips or advice I’d welcome them. I’m not overly bothered about getting published (modesty suggests I’m not that good) but I would like to take a proper stab at it… if I do it at all, I fear this may be another flash in the pan idea but, whilst the iron is hot.. no wait, which metaphor am I using??