🚀 go-pugleaf

Are there any other tech writers who read this SIG and reside on the bottom
on the food chain?
   I'm a senior tech writer for a NASA contractor and when it comes to pure
technical writing/editing, we're the last people called into a project.
Here's a perfect example:
   Our Space Experiments Division is preparing an experiment for a Get Away
Special on the shuttle. They're ready to ship to Kennedy, except NASA rules
say they must have documentation to go along with the experiment.
   Up trot three engineers (You can't teach me nothin', I's a engineer)
with a 200+ page document cobbled together from everyone's individual
documents. I'll quote this verbatim:
   "We put off the documentation because we could let that slip with the
least amount of pain."
   Now they want an edited document incorporating all contributor changes,
graphs, tables, and figures. They want automated paragraph numbering, an
automated table of contents, and an automated figure list. And they wanted
50 copies of it in three weeks. By the way, they hadn't gotten all of the
authorial changes yet. Oh yeah, you can only have 80 hours to do the job.
   We have a saying in our technical writing group: We're the people the
engineers call in when they've only got $10 and two weeks left in the
project.
   Now I've seen other tech writers on here talking about being valued
members of the team, involved from day one; they've been put on patent
applications; they've been given milk and honey; they've been succored in
their hours of need. I find these claims hard to swallow.
  Are we the only ones facing this kind of treatment?
-- 
Pete Nofel, aa794, primary sysop
It's a Mystery - The Mystery Literature Group
Cleveland Freenet, Cleveland Ohio