First, the good news. They’re not copying what I’ve written any more. The bad news: they’re just copying items verbatim out of the manual.

Now, technically, a lot of this stuff is useful, but what really steams my gourd, is the thought of their supervisors mistakenly approving of this torpor as real work. Somehow "copy and paste" doesn’t seem deserving of praise.

"If at first you don’t succeed…"

This is sound advice in most situations. Well, most honest situations, anyhow. If, by mischance or ineptitude, you fail to realize your goal of murdering a busload of crippled nuns, or your crack dealer won’t accept your infant in exchange for another hit of 8-ball, most of society would very much rather you gave up.

Last week, somebody here submitted some articles to the database that I couldn’t use. Why? Because they were already in the database. How did I know that? Because I fucking wrote them. I rejected the articles, and sent a general "hey, tell your people not to copy existing content" message to the supervisors of the technical support team that’s been writing most of the new articles.Yesterday, though, the same guy cribbed another one of my articles and sent it up the pipe for approval.

I nearly choked on my midmorning dram of schnapps in amazement. Hello?!? Either the supervisors didn’t bother to pass my gentle admonishment on to their suffering minions, or this guy thinks I’m even more stupified than I already am after sifting through piles of dreck. Possibly both. Still, though, helloooo? I know you can’t spell "plagiarism", but could you at least refrain from it?

It’s never fun when you fat-finger something at work, and quit applications as you’re deep into work on them. Nobody likes to redo work that has already been performed to one’s satisfaction.

My desk is now deeply indented in front of the keyboard from my repeatedly pounding my head into it in sheer frustration. The delicate spatter of blood is like a light crimson dew on my monitors. It is slowly collecting itself into tiny rivulets, sanguine streams of essence, seeking, as liquids are wont, the easiest, fastest path through the cracks of my desk, and from there to drip into the foul, frayed carpeting in my cubicle, thus passing into a mundande yet sordid oblivion. The story of my life, cast in a sickly carmine hue.

The sad thing is that I do this all the time. I have to many edit technical articles at a time through a web interface, and am constantly opening new browser tabs in order to do so most efficiently. When an article is amended (or marred, as some might maintain), and the changes submitted, I close the tab, being done with that task. When my group of tabs are gone, I reach into the database for another dozen articles or so, opening each one up in a new tab.

The tragedy is that the keystroke on the Mac to close a tab, Command-W, is very close to the keystroke to quit the browser (or any other application, for that matter), Command-Q. As in physically close. As in too goddamn close for my stubby, tired digits to manipulate correctly every day, apparently. I’ve hosed my work in eight articles today, so far, through this stupid method.

Screw it. I’m going home.

I’m starting to lose my mind reviewing all these knowledgebase articles that our Tier 1 technicians are submitting for review. Apparently, instruction in proper punctuation was one of the first things to be removed from the curriculum when budget cuts hit whatever cesspit they were educated in. Of course, the much-abused apostrophe usually figures prominently in their butchery of the Mother Tongue. Im also finding other horrors such as the droning sentence that runs on and on breathlessly without any sort of punctuation whatsoever because somehow the author seems to have thought that cramming several disparate ideas or sequenced steps somehow makes the finished work more condensed and readily digestible or perhaps they simply dont understand what all those funny little squiggles on the big scary keyboard are used for.

Then; of, course we have the scattershot approach of the author’s who either: enjoy using punctuation mark’s, or while, not understanding them fully know enough, to recognize, that they hold some sort of importance and figure that, the law of average’s mean’s that at least some, of them will end up in the right place’s. Let us not forget, either, the greevous mispeling errors and capitolization flubs, ok? At least I don’t have to deal with anything l337. Yet.

Seriously, though, where did some of you people learn to write?

I remember reading recently about how e-mail is actually decreasing the productivity of some people because they’re interrupting their workflow to read and respond to a flurry of messages throughout the day. I laughed at such simpletons who obviously were the same sort of people who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Fools and halfwits, obviously.

Then I met my match in RSS, and I now realize I’ve got to get rid of it. I’m addicted to the feeds; I can’t resist moving the cursor over to the menu bar whenever I see there’s new items posted. "Oooh, what just got Slashdotted? Will it be cool? What is the Washington Post vomiting forth? What quasi-trend is Wired prattling on about?" So I seem to be thinking. I can’t leave the stupid thing alone. It’s almost a compulsion. No, actually, I think it is a compulsion. I can’t stand not knowing whatever it is the feeds think I should know. Thank God I only rarely watch TV, or I’d probably be swallowing all that crap as well.

Like a lot of people, I like to swim in a sea of realtime data, but these goddamned RSS feeds are killing me. I’ll probably have to take it like a man and go cold turkey, cut off from the warm, steady flow of pap that simultaneously enriches and impoverishes my already flimsy excuse for an intellect. I don’t think just limiting the number of subscribed feeds is going to be effective. It’s like old Horace the Wino down the street "reforming" by cutting down to three bottles of Cisco.

Despite its usefulness, I have to put RSS down into the Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time category, at least for me. I guess I just can’t handle it. It’s crack in XML format, I’m tellin’ ya. Stay off of it if you know what’s good for you! Don’t follow me into the abyss! Save yourselves while there’s time!

As our department’s sole technical writer, I have to vet a lot of internally-generated documents.

Many of them just plain suck.

I’m sorry, but frankly, I don’t know how some of the people who work here were able to submit job applications with a straight face, considering that, like everyplace else, "excellent written communication skills" is listed as a requirement on all our job postings. Obviously, these people are having Mommy retype their résumés, assuming enough snot and sticky handprints can be wiped off them so that the crayon and finger paint underneath is legible. The fact that they hold even high school diplomas (though here I must admit I am only guessing at their level of academic achievement) is a stunning indictment of our public school system.

There have been cases escalated to our engineering group that have been literally incomprehensible, the kind of stream-of-consciousness babble that makes you wonder if they’re not dropping acid in between phone calls. Some of the engineers have actually had to send cases back because they simply can’t discern what the fuck some of these people are talking about. Having never spoken so much as a word to many of the newer people on the call floor, I wonder if their verbal skills are equally abysmal. God help our customers if that’s the case; they might begin clamoring for our jobs to be shipped out to Hyderabad so that they’re able to talk to someone who is at least deliberately trying to speak English.