So, Vancouver met me with 2 am morning twilight, a perfect bouquet and sweet hugs from my husband in a deserted huge airport halls with a sterile soft carpet floor. So was my coming.

But what about the ice-cream? In Ukraine, I’ve not eaten ice-cream for years because of a total taste and quality abuse of this ancient treat. I used to eat it in my childhood when, you know, the grass was greener, and ice-cream sweeter. In my student years, I opted for this desert as it was the only appropriate and cheap dish to refresh herself in a daily 3-hour journey from the university to home. Nowadays it should be a great disappointment or failure to search the ice-cream.

Today, it is the day! What is the reason? Oh, this is a new little story waiting to be told. See “How to persuade your medical insurance company that you aren’t a camel” soon. But now I’m waiting for my husband who is smarter and can find even a camel if I need for me, even in Robson street

I hate  general tips lilke – “define your aim, define your audience, and write”.

How? What? Where to start? What is the template?

Personally, I am always interested in practical tips, steps to follow and get a result. Of course, be realistic, there is no single way to pave your way for perfect writing, but like in dancing right steps make a dance.

Writing experience vs self-control !

Recently I decided to replace my old winter hat and attacked the web. As a tuned-in girl, I was ready to spent an hour (actually 5 or more if required) to look through all that stuff found in the search results. It supposed to be something knitted, slightly decorated to distinguish me from the gray developers’ mass.

Before this moment,
I hardly could count a couple of hat’s types – hat, cap, or panama at the best. Oh, by the way, check how many types you know.

Hah! Imagine, tens of hat types have been happily existing in the world. I have founded at least two tens of them.

“If you want to get ahead, get a hat”. This is an old  advertising slogan, used by Dunn & Co, hatmakers in the UK in 40-s.  In those days the hat was the essential thing to prove the status and well-being of the owner. When selected properly for the occasion, the hat almost guaranteed the success in the business.

I remembered that slogan and thought that  it is still true when applied to the company texts. When comes to corporate writing the rules are the same. Here are some of them:

1. Wear a hat that best matches your face and style. Most of us wear a hat, especially during cold days. It protects our heads from cold and fall-out, matches all pieces of our clothes, looks like most headgears worn by people of your age, class and a profit level.  But who said that you must limit yourself to the trivial hat offered at any store this season? Opt to an ushanka hat, try aviator & trapper hats, or wear a good French beret. The copy of the company web site is like a winter daily hat that is 24 hours in public, being available for everyone. It should match the company’s image, aims, policy, the market niche hunted etc. Let the web site wear an interesting and matching copy.
2. Each hat serves its occasion. You can’t wear a panama in winter and a Kentucky derby hat daily. You can, to be true, and many do, but what’s the point?  Heading for a special occasion, for example a wedding, pick a fascinator. Note it is a pre-requisite for entry to the racecourse. For morning jogging, you’d better pull on a beanie or a knit hat.
   If the company sells the product or service, it doesn’t hide it or depict it in an unfavourable light. Quite the contrary! The company does create a great ad copy to promote it.  If the company has a blog, it is the place to share the knowledge, tips and tricks in a friendly relaxed way without direct advertisement.
3. Wear one hat per time.You may have a felt cloche, a velour fedora, and a cotton bucket hat at your wardrobe. But when going outdoors, you usually select only one of them (unless you are a trend-setter). It’s not a good way to write any of  the marketing documents without a precise understanding of the audience document purpose, and the company aims. “Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” Composing  all-inclusive documents for everybody who will be met on the road will result in nothing but unfruitful efforts.
4. Wear your hat with dignity In old times no matter what type of hat you wore, the hat gave you a respectable look. Nowadays a hat is no more than a piece of clothing, and often is misused. T-shirts goes with fascinators, men do not tip (i.e., slightly lifting the hat off your forehead) when meeting a lady, and ladies are rare… Coming back to writing, the times have been changed. On the web “Click and buy” goes better that two sentences. There is no room for descriptive passages and long thought. But whatever the company writes, it should not lose the dignity of good writing and proper style as a hat is good when followed by hat etiquette.

If you have cheerfully looked at this heading and a surprised look has appeared on your face, if you have no idea where more fun lives except your working place, well, do not close this page, but bookmark it for the further look.

Whether it seasonable or appearing at the second phase of the long-term project, can be quickly cured with an extra day off or requires drastic measures, sooner or later it comes to steal our fun at work and replace it with anything from a sad look and boredom to quick thoughts of suicide.

When the job sucks, when  “fuck‘, “fucking‘”, “damn” are just the very words to describe your tasks, (unless you can’t express anything without them – hm!, it’s ok if you are an IT expert with at least 3-year experience),  it’s time to start getting fun at work.

“What shall I do?”, “Where is my enthusiasm?” have occurred my mind recently. My favourite writing tasks, my beloved ability to convert words into clear sentences, skills to structure the text into compelling copy peppered with style and appeal haven’t made me happy any longer. Of course, as a tech writer, having been writing help topics and tutorials on multiple topics from software installation problems to how to brew a cup of tea, the first thing I did was searching for a tutorial  to recover my fun. Ok, the web knocked me down with tons of articles, tips, tricks and even books with catchy headings like

• Enjoy!: 101 Ways to Add Fun to Your Work Every Day
• Make Work Fun: 139 Ways to Lighten Up Your Workplace
• 301 ways to get fun at work

“What is the problem?”,  you may think, just grab some of such books, wet your finger and turn over the pages full of ways. So I did it. Here are some funny tips that are highly recommended:

1. Wear a funny hat or outfit. Try socks of different colors. This tip reinsures that a usual baggy oufit of IT experts can recover the mood of their colleagues.
2. Do things backwards. Oh, so that was the answer! Many do, even my  boss does, should I at last adopt these practices?
3. Change the setting. Get outside! It won’t suit, I’d like to work on the roof of our business center, but it’s not permitted
4. Play a practical joke on your coworkers. Aha, this suits me perfectly. But those geeks are all about joking, I can’t compete with them. But I’ll start on Monday.
5. Bring an extra dessert for your boss. Hm! I should think about this.
6. Don’t wear any underwear. Who knows how it helps…
7. Wash a co-worker’s car during your lunch. Yeah, my car is round the corner. Please, wash it by 6.00 p.m.
8. Do your boss’s or co-worker’s most hated task. Let me do one that is mine.
9. Come up with a wild idea for the advertising department even if you aren’t in their department. I wonder whether it helps my boss who follows this advice.
10. Flirt with a co-worker who won’t tell the HR manager. …?

It’s up to you what tips to follow (try to wash a boss’s car or do hated tasks backwards:), but hunter for the opportunities that your job (whatever hateful it is) can generate for you.

Remember the words of Thomas Alva Edison: “Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

I’ll post the techniques used by those who succeeded soon.

Should I keep the dainty for evening home absorption and sink my teeth into insipid data things for insipid people?

Tell me not to leave my job and go to some women’s monthlies. They have no space for my favourite harmonious phrases like “database project deployment connections”, “batch formatting”, “user-defined procedure debugging”, “custom object mapping” etc etc.

Unfortunately, all the men even blindfolded database genii, Senior geeks and other Visual Studio charmers dream of those fake pin-up girls that decorate brand-new vehicles in auto salons or save the world in the action games – big bubs,  the bigger the better, less clothes, the less the better, evening makeup (fresh twenty-four hours a day) and a complex hairdo (usually requires a skillful hairdresser to succeed).

I remember the fabulous heroine of the recently seen classic American-Hollywood film “The Devil is a Woman” magnificently played by even more fabulous Marlene Dietrich…

… arched eyebrows (artificially painted over the totally plucked natural ones), gorgeous velvety eyelashes (fake of course), glossy lips on the matchless snow-white skin doll’s face (think of that amount of powder used), hairs in sexy waves (at least 4 hours to spend and a skillful hairdresser), add some laces, don’t forget to lace something, for example, an umbrella and you will get an image worthy of a developer, I bet.

How perfect  I would be in that stuff (and how clumsy at my laptop and a pile of notes, dictionaries, and my tea in my big favourite mug – no glamourous porcelain teacups

Tech writer should not be glamourous a fortiori fabulous – but IT field deals with some fabulous things, maybe someday it will refer to tech writers who knows…

But now a mundane and realistic tech writer (even with curly hair and glossy lips) in hackneyed jeans and fixed look  is hopelessly defeated by those “divas”…

Today I feel unwell and will stay the whole day alone at home. Leaving three tens of change requests and bleak prospects to fix them  at office. Oh, requests are worthy of being the main hero of the series of articles. I have much to say about these quick notes of an overloaded developer or a tester exhausted from regression testing. But the best examples are fixation of our Boss who is skillful in fucking our brains.

How would you feel if you are constantly asked to trample on dignity of press releases?

Suppose you, being astonishingly initiative, have enunciated that regular writing of press releases will help to promote the company products and you can do that writing. You know that the value of press releases is not a secret since it turned 100-years-old. But this value should be proved to our boss.

Being astonishingly stubborn as well as initiative, you tried to stuff this idea to ears of your colleagues-writers, your team leader and even innocent people in corridors and lunchrooms. In several months, (oh, it took less than 1 year as was with placing testimonials on the company website)  the boss has asked you to explore the format and principles of writing press releases.

You dug the Internet to refresh the knowledge, read every news in competitors press rooms, go to the boss’s favourites web sites, do a collage of screenshots and quotations and …

send it to your BOSS along with your press release, rewritten based on best samples and reviewed with your project manager (experienced and smart guy, by the way) several times.

Ok, the press release doesn’t suit everybody, it’s not the boss’s cup of tea. After 5 revisions and long discussions at the boss’s table, your creation resembles a list of release notes with a header and About Company section containing a plucked company description.

No company location and citation of any company representatives or partners (the boss considers our company is not worth of declaring its thoughts and intentions in public), no adjectives to set our product apart from others (as there are others that are better than we are, according to our boss). . .

I hardly can add these press releases to my portfolio as I am ashamed to explain why my press releases tend to hide the company achievements (can we use this word referring to our company, Boss? ) from the public instead of highlight them…

c’est la vie – as my ex-colleague tech writer would say

By the way, I start missing my job and office being at home half a day already. No struggle, no discussions and no jokes of my colleagues.