English-speakers are nihilists

"...all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large."
— H. P. Lovecraft

Sometimes I wish that the English language had an equivalent of L'Académie française. It's basically a regulatory body for the French language. Of course, it has no actual authority, and is sometimes comically out of step with the modern world in some cases, but still, there is a definitive, single, "correct" way of doing things in French, thanks to that group.

No such thing exists in English. Dictionaries and grammar guides cite regionalisms and common usage and stuff, but there's no definitive authority. This means that my job is sometimes a matter of picking which authority or rule seems more relevant, doing things one way in one part of a document and another way in another, splitting hairs, and sometimes just plain guessing.

For example, the doomed project contains about a dozen instances of a phrase like "must have leak proof, fireproof or fireproof-increased safety plumbing". The problem is, the document was inconsistent about exactly how "leak proof" was formatted, sometimes with a hyphen between the words, sometimes with a space, and sometimes with no separation at all.

As I was searching throughout the document to identify instances of this, I found some in the names of technical standards we reference, so that seemed to be the easiest way to resolve it: conform with the existing standards already published and in use by the industry. Simple enough, right?

No. Because there's more than one technical standard with a version of "leak proof" in the name, and they don't all handle it the same way.

OK, so I e-mailed all my fellow tech writers asking for advice. They referred to the relevant rule in the office's style guide about compounding and modifiers, which I should have thought of on my own because this is hardly the first time I've dealt with this. Based on how the phrase is used, it should be hyphenated. Fine, I've gone through the document and hyphenated it.

That doesn't match how it appears in one of those standards' names, but there's nothing we can do about that. Got to keep names as they appear on the title page, or no one could ever find them. There'd be chaos. We have some documents with English vs. American spelling, and that kind of inconsistency is OK, so this should be OK too.

But wait, there's more! It's not just inconsistency between one standard's name and the rest of the document. It's inconsistency within the phrase. It's now "must have leak-proof, fireproof or fireproof-increased safety plumbing". Using "leak-proof, fireproof" side by that is ugly and confusing and looks wrong even though it's technically not. We do it about a dozen times.

If there was an Academy of the English Language, then this problem might not exist at all. And weird situations would still arise sooner or later just because complicated rules make complicated situations, but at least there would be one right answer to fall back on. But there's not. There's just me, and whatever rules I copy and paste together.

Vignette II

According to the schedule, the stuff he was talking about was supposed to be done Friday. On Monday, I found out it wasn't done, but was left with the impression that it would be done by today. It was hard to pin him down when I talked to him just now, but I got the impression it probably won't be done by Thursday.

Vignette

The lead SME on the doomed project came in to talk to me for a few minutes just now. He's getting a bit pushy about dividing up work and is stressed about how things are going, but as I've said, he's been forbidden from seeing his family, so I guess I should give him a break.

After he left, my cubicle neighbor IMed me to commiserate about working with him. I thanked him and pointed out that while the lead SME is annoying, the unhelpful guy is definitely worse as far as helping me actually do my job goes. For example, as I told my neighbor:

I sent him an e-mail yesterday with four questions, numbered for convenience. He sent me a reply back with answers to three, and he misnumbered one of them. And the missing answer is not something mysterious or complicated, it's just "what should I name this table?"

I sent him another e-mail with that question but still haven't got an answer to that, even though I have to other things.

Hostage situation

The lead subject matter expert on the doomed project has been forbidden from seeing his family until there's some kind of progress on the project*. Unfortunately, this means that he's going around trying to resolve lingering issues. Saying that it sounds good to clean up lingering issues would be banal, but this is not the time for it.

First of all, the lawyers have the document to review the changes made in this review. Someone else in the document working on something else introduces version control issues and just generally gets messy. And secondly, right now I'd estimate that at least half the comments in the document are not the kind of thing anyone needs to worry about. Some are repetitive: there's a question about how to format the name of something, the name is used a dozen different places, and there's a comment pointing it out at almost every instance. Others are notes to self: the lawyer or I thought of something but couldn't take care of it right that minute, so we put a note in so we wouldn't forget, but it's still something we can take care of ourselves and other people don't need to worry about it. The lawyer will clean up a lot of her notes to herself, and the first thing I'll do when the lawyer is done with it is clean up the repetitive comments and stuff like that. So the lead SME could save everyone a lot of trouble if he just waited until I'd done that.

Unfortunately, he can't, due to his boss's ultimatum. So he's sent out several e-mails about individual issues and this morning he asked me to send him a copy of the document so he can work on things while the lawyer has the document occupied for her own work. (I almost told him he didn't need my help for that, but at the last minute I realized the last thing I want to do is encourage a greater involvement and more hands-on approach by anyone.) I don't know exactly what specific goals the lead SME was given, if any, but I hope he can be satisfied by having comments resolved by next week, which has been the schedule for the past month and (so far) we're still on track to meet that.

As for me, things on the doomed project are slow for me this week, because like I said, the lawyer's in there. Just in time for people to try to get my other two projects moving**, but anyways.

* No, that is not hyperbole. His family lives about four states away. He apparently has been in the habit of taking frequent three- or four-day weekends to see them, using RDOs and/or time off as he accumulates it. His boss is not letting him do that at the moment. So it's not hyperbole, but it's not quite as tyrannical as it sounds either.

** I suppose I should be grateful they're doing it now instead of next week or last week. It's hard to appreciate, though. I am still doing some work on the doomed project these days and am anxious about what's coming up, so it's a bit annoying to have meetings on projects that really don't matter as much and, despite their own problems, are in much better shape overall.

PowerPoint sucks

Fun facts on PowerPoint:

• The "criticism" section of the Wikipedia page on it is more than 30 percent of the total length. (601 words out of 1,926, not counting footnotes, infoboxes not part of the actual article, etc.)


• Former members of the Army have praised PowerPoint for its ability avoid sharing information, like in press briefings where the speaker wants to avoid tough questions.


• PowerPoint has been cited as one of the causes of the Space Shuttle explosion in 2003.

Clearly, PowerPoint is a great threat to the Republic.

OK, clearly, not really. The problem is, just like lots of other computerized things, stupid people use it thoughtlessly, freely. If someone was going to do a presentation that would be 84 slides, if he had to create all the slides using transparencies or an actual slide projector by hand, before he had even started he'd say to himself, "Wait a minute, do I really need all this? I'm not even sure we have enough transparencies in the supply closet. Most of the text will be OK, but I'd have to do some of the graphs by hand, and that would be ugly. And anyways, this is a ton of information. Maybe I should summarize and condense it better. Or take out all the parts that aren't really, really important. Or just call in sick that day."

If you have PowerPoint, though, and you want to do a presentation that's 84 slides, well, fuck it, why not? There are no office supplies to run out of. Putting pictures on slides is as easy as text and using zany formatting is even easier than those. If a slide winds up unreadable with dense text, it's actually easier to split it onto a second slide than to edit the text to be more concise. The program makes visual aids for presentations so easy that you don't even have to think about it. So some people choose not to.

The well-meaning but dumb boss, for example. Last week's presentation was available for download on the department's Web site for some strange reason, so I got it and counted the slides. 84. The meeting was only scheduled to take an hour. If the meeting ended on time and if he had actually bothered to show us all the slides, that would have been more than one a minute, so we would have been rushed indeed. Unfortunately, the meeting took an hour and a half, and after I downloaded it I found that he still didn't get through all of them.

I intend to follow this post up later, with even more problems from last week's meeting and from other meetings in general, but that right there is a big, obvious one: if you have more than, say, one slide for every minute of expected speaking time, then you're probably doing something wrong.

What's the difference between a bad liar, bad salesman and bad manager?

Related to the previous post, the meeting two days ago to discuss the move was typically horrible. It ran half an hour late due to all the questions about how bad things would be, well into lunch. The well-meaning but dumb department head did almost all the talking, and he remains a bad speaker, unable to get to the point, unaware of where his microphone is, and seems to be going from bad to worse with PowerPoint. Seriously, I'll try to do a post about his presentation itself. It deserves the attention from a "what not to do" perspective.

I have to give him credit for at least one part of the meeting, though. We've known that the move was coming for a while now. It's unpopular, for all the reasons discussed in my previous post. We got some details at yesterday's meeting that only made things worse, couldn't get some details that we wanted, the good news was rare and trivial, and with every meeting on the subject the day gets a little closer and the lack of a reprieve gets more obvious. The WMBD guy never could have had a friendly crowd yesterday.

So I'll give him credit for grinning and bearing it. Even getting some hostile, arguably unprofessional questions, as far as I could tell he didn't do anything worse than try to put a positive spin on his next answer and maybe fumble his words even more. Still doesn't make me feel better about his competence, but at least it kept the meeting itself from being any worse.

Change is bad

There was a meeting yesterday about plans for the move of our department to a new, big, modernized, state-of-the-art facility. Everyone in the offices hates this and wishes there were some way out of it.

One big problem is that they designed the new place on the assumption that a lot of people in other departments would move there in addition to just us, but it now looks like the other departments will join us years later, if ever. (Why? Because of funding cuts, somehow.) And the design called for sharing certain facilities among all departments, but most shared facilities will not be completed or at least not available until and unless the other departments join us. Since one of those shared facilities is the cafeteria, this is a problem. Until they open that up, we will only have a "snack bar" with seating for 50. I'd estimate that's less than a quarter of our current cafeteria's capacity, and of course, a snack bar probably won't have much cooked food. I'm sure that refrigerators, microwaves, and break rooms will be available somewhere, but we couldn't get straight answers at yesterday's meeting about how many there will be or our close to workspaces they will be. Likewise for the credit union. That doesn't affect me, but it'll probably be even worse for most people.

Beyond that, it's inconvenient to get to. Our current location isn't all that great, but there's a shuttle from a major metro hub and we're just five minutes from major highways. For those who drive, there's quite a bit of parking around here, although not enough for everyone. So there are options. At the future location, there's no on-street parking. There will still be a shuttle, but as of the meeting yesterday they don't know where it will go from, and that major metro hub seems unlikely to me. Not only that, but the whole complex is big. If the shuttle only goes to the main gate (no straight answer on that either), then it would be a 10-minute walk to our office. As for parking, there is no on-street parking in the complex. There is a parking garage, and we might be able to use the space meant for people from other departments before they're there, which would actually be an advantage to being there alone... but we can't get a straight answer on that either. There's one entrance and exit from the complex, which will probably be very crowded at rush hour.

Now that I write it down, a little of the negative reaction to the move is probably reflexive distrust of unheaval, even though the negative reaction is universal. Because a lot the problems are the result of the fact that our department will be there alone for years before anyone joins us, if they ever do - but half the problems are mitigated by that. No cafeteria or credit union really sucks, but we might wind up having enough parking for everyone, traffic won't be bad, and there will be plenty of storage space.

However, there's no help for the location. It'll almost double my commute.