Back at Hunter, as I mentioned earlier, I had an opportunity to teach a class in Fortran Programming, but it didn’t pan out. Now it looked like I may get another chance.

    This department, Education and Technical Publications, or Tech Pubs for short, had several responsibilities. They provided documentation for the software (initially in written form and then digitally on the internet), explaining what it did in laymen’s terms, release notes describing new updates to the software that we provided periodically to the clients, and educational materials, showing how to run the software. It seemed that my going to Prep was going to come in handy again. I enjoyed all three facets and will try and discuss them in detail.

    Documentation and release notes are pretty much the same things. The documentation explains what each of the applications does. When you go into a credit union, step up to the tellers and they start typing and/or clicking away, they are running different applications. There are also what are called “back office” applications. They take care of what goes on after you do your business during the day. All this is explained in the basic documentation.

    It is pretty cut and dry, some may say boring, but it is necessary so that the people at the credit unions have something to refer to if they have a problem. In my personal life, whenever I open a package containing some new product or device, I always read the inserts that accompany that product or device. I spent a lot of time creating that kind of documentation for our software, so I guess you would say I consider it common courtesy to read them. And sadly, now that we get a lot of things from outside the US, I cringe when I read misspellings and grammatical errors. The same thing for social media, where, sadly, I see how little people seem to know about their own language. But I digress.

    Release notes are in the same format as documentation, but they contain new features and fixes to bugs that have been found in the software. As it is with most software, periodically, you provide a newer version, or “release,” which has the latest “bells and whistles.” Anybody with a computer or smart device has had to go through this when they have installed new updates. We provided periodic updates to the software and each update had a release number (think Windows 10, IOS 10.0, etc.), and an associated set of release notes.

    A little bit of a tangent here. I have been involved with many, many computer programmers over my career. They can be a breed unto themselves. Programming requires logical thinking, but often logical thinking does not go hand in hand with verbal acuity. I have often met programmers who were very good at what they did, but sometimes they could not put two coherent sentences together. And their spelling and grammar were often atrocious.

    I would occasionally describe what I was doing with documentation and release notes as “translating” from “Computerese” to English. When a programmer would update an application, add a new feature, or correct a “bug”, they would send us notes regarding what they did. And often it was a chore putting it into understandable English. But I felt I was up to the task.

And the thing was, I was pretty darn good at it. In fact, I thought that, after so many years of working as a programmer, I might have actually found my true calling. The people who worked in this department were predominantly people who were more literary than technical. I, on the other hand, had an excellent background in English, combined with 25+ years of technical experience. I knew the software down cold, but I could also explain it better than most. The supervisor was a literary person who appreciated proper grammar, spelling, etc. He said that I was the best Technical Writer he ever had work for him and I basically had little to no prior experience. And I agreed with him.

    So I dug into it with a vengeance, because I loved what I was doing. This was the perfect job for me. It didn’t go unnoticed, either. After only three months, the manager promoted me to Senior Technical Writer. This came back to bite me in the butt later on, but I'll get to that shortly.

    The last of the three was educational materials, and I eventually came to love this as well, maybe most of all. Once a year, we would have a Client Conference, where all the clients throughout the US would converge on San Diego and get together at one of the hotels here. They would come to mingle, see new hardware and software solutions and come to classes and presentations, given by none other than our department.

    Whew, I finally got to the point of my first paragraph in this chapter. We would develop PowerPoint Presentations, rehearse in the office, time ourselves, and then perform in auditoriums of up to 100+ people. I remember having a mini anxiety attack before the first one I ever did. After I got started, however, I cruised through it and couldn’t wait for the next one. If you remember way back in one of the earliest chapters, I was pretty much a runt in my younger years (I proceeded up the aisle in my 8th-grade graduation second in line by height) and also pretty shy. So this opportunity allowed me to open up and be in front of a group of people. It was fun! And there was also an added bonus!

    Besides the Client Conference presentations, we also gave classes, both in the office and on the road. I started doing a New Employee Orientation class, explaining the software to the latest hires. I then started going out on the road, doing the same thing for client employees. I was having a good time. But sadly, that was about to change--