In Other Words

Morning madness

So they finally gave me a machine to play with at work. Two as a matter of fact, both DVD players. I have to admit, it isn’t half as much fun as I thought it would be. On hindsight, it’s hard to imagine why I would have thought it was fun. Simply because I get to play with the machines doesn’t mean I get to watch movies (I’m sitting in the middle of a giant hall with approximately a hundred other people around me in their cubicle work stations.) All I get to do is scroll through the limited menus available inside the machine and look at small snippets of bad DVDs.

I’m supposed to write the technical manual for this new model DVD that has just arrived. That means scrolling through the menus available and adjusting an old manual so that it represents this new machine. Of course they don’t give me a soft copy of the old menu, no that would be far to practical, instead I get a hard copy of the old manual and I’m supposed to write up a soft copy of the new manual.

In other words, large swaths of the old manual will have to be manually copied back into the PC. I imagine 30 to 40% of the manual wont change, so that will be straight out, drone like, retyping.

That’s ok though, because I can blind type at a pretty mean clip and it means that I can just sit here and type away at other things without anybody noticing (just make sure the right documents are proceeding at a good pace and hit ALT + TAB at the right moments).

I could not imagine doing this for years on end. Technical manuals are not the way for me. Oh well, at least I have a definite date ahead when its all over and I can switch to something else. The challenge will be to make sure I have something more exciting to switch to. Hopefully that will not be too difficult. Maybe they need some people to watch the grass grow at the old folks homes.

Oh well, it won’t be terribly useful for me to start worrying about it now, just keep working and keep improving my book. That reminds me, the back page of expat. Still haven’t done that and still haven’t figured out what I want to write about, that and the insider’s guide.

An opinion piece should be about one of my opinions, but I have so many! Which one do I choose?

Interesting fact: Carrots were originally white and purple (them being roots and all) they became orange when farmers in the Netherlands buggered around with them and got them to imitate the Dutch royal house’s colours. Its funny how we think so many things man made are ‘perfectly natural’.

posted by Symbol @ 17.8.04