I have also been faced with having to document reports and I think the basic information I supplied was very similar to what you came up with.

I’m glad I could help you hark back. I’m not surprised you didn’t have the official title, small companies are more concerned with getting the job done than with formal structure.

I’m enjoying this series – it’s bringing back a lot of memories of first starting out in this game in the early to mid-90s. I’d actually been doing the job of a technical writer for a few years before I knew it had a name. That’s what happens when you work as a lone writer in a small start-up where job titles don’t matter at first.

Rhondas last blog post..What’s ‘national’?

It appears that you and I have even more in common. Later in the series, I will be discussing the persona I adopted for dealing with job interviews and other situations.

I’m an introvert as well and extremely uncomfortable with making “first contact.” I know that was my greatest obstacle in my most recent job. I might still be there if I had been willing to play the part of an extrovert and get information I needed to keep me busy. But, alas, it was easy to spend days holed up in my office without contact with anyone else in the bureau, and such an environment just made my shell thicker.

In my current position, I don’t have the luxury of wallowing in my introvertedness. I am sharing an room with a coworker and I have zillions of meetings to attend, most of which I am expected to actively participate in. The good news is I’m working with a former employer and coworkers, not strangers.

I often pride myself on my acting ability, my ability to appear as though I’m at ease with a group of strangers, but the acting takes a lot of energy and leaves me rather fatigued. And it’s not enough. I know I probably would be in a very different situation if I had not been painfully shy in my childhood and teenage years. But I can say for sure that I would be happier? No, and so I embrace my introverted nature and move on.

I like the steps you used to document the reports. I used powerpoint and screenshots to walk my coworkers through the database I had created for documenting our programs. Screenshots are great, and I think the best manuals include them.

I also had a similar experience using PageMaker and FrameMaker. Several years ago, I created a 100+ page report using PageMaker. Even though we had FrameMaker, no one in my section had received training on either so we were learning as we went. I was well into my report when a colleague showed what he was doing in FrameMaker, and I realized that I was using the wrong program. FrameMaker was different enough from PageMaker that I decided to not to switch software. I suffered but the report eventually was finished. Still, lesson learned: research the software to make sure it’s appropriate for your purposes.

As far as workarounds … ? I’ll have to think more about that. Sometimes I think life is a workaround.

Oh, and thanks for the teasers at the end of this article. Now I can’t wait for your next installment!