Technical Writers’ Lunch Break Stories

Last year we hired a new player to our team – Bradley Nice, a former technical communicator and blogger on Medium. Brad has a vast amount of experience in both being a part of technical documentation departments in companies and working on his own as a freelance technical writer. Throughout his career a lot of hilarious cases must’ve occurred to him and his coworkers. We asked Brad to share a few stories with our blog subscribers (join them using the form below this post) and occasional readers and he kindly agreed. Below we give a full article written by Brad for the readers of ClickHelp Technical Writing Blog.

Hello, fellow technical writers. Please, make yourself comfortable, grab some snacks and get ready to have a good laugh. Who says that a life of a technical writer is boring and eventless? Seems like a lot of people do. Well, today I’m here to tell you a couple of stories that might actually change your mind.

The Main Course

Here’s the first story. This story concerns, I’d say, the collective mind of tech writers working in the IT industry. That awkward moment when you need to describe a really complicated feature and your inner perfectionist just won’t let go. So, you start playing with the app, researching, spend hours to understand how to describe this feature better, how would most of the users apply it, etc. Hours pass, and you are still not satisfied with the research although the help topic starts getting really long. You decide that it’s time to go ask a guru for help. By the guru, I mean a developer, of course. You go to the devs’ secret lair, afraid that you will be laughed at or frowned upon. You come up to a developer and ask them briefly mentioning the results of your investigation. But, instead of answering your question, the developer goes: ‘Brad, I didn’t even know this feature could do that. We didn’t create it on purpose. Actually, it was just some old code we were too scared to delete, so…erm…great job, man!’

The Salad

Another one happened to a friend of mine. That guy had some experience in technical writing and graphic design, but since he moved to another state, finding a job wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. So, when he almost gave up to find anything in the tech writing field, a friend phoned him and said that there was an opening nearby and the employer loved his CV and would gladly hire him. Our guy got really excited. He was like ‘Finally, I’m going to be employed as a tech writer to make the world a more structured and clear place, woo-hoo!’. So, he came to the office to have a job interview and…well, hello ÖDMJUK, KNUTSTORP, RIKTIG ÖGLA and hundreds of other names no one can’t either pronounce or spell. Welcome to IKEA, friend 😉

The Dessert

That’s it for the stories. I’ve gathered some advanced high-quality content – memes! Now, you will truly see how much fun being a technical writer is, and how funny we are. Without further ado, here’s a bunch of memes by/for/about technical writers:

I hope that I’ve managed to cheer you up a little. We all love our jobs and take it seriously, but the good ol’ fun can do no harm here. Quite the contrary. Now that you are rested and energized, you may go have a productive day!

Good Luck with your technical writing career!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices