The Secret Grandiosity of Technical Writers

I recently posted an essay (on another blog) about Lee Harvey Oswald, grandiosity and me.

Briefly, the premise is this…

Grandiosity is a game played with reality. It is the belief that the rules - the odds, don’t apply to you. That you are special. All grandiosity starts out as private dreams and schemes. It becomes public if the need is great (if the present reality sucks badly enough) and if a beneficent accident happens that suggests the impossible might really be possible. At that point - given talent, persistence and more luck, the dweeb might sprout wings - or pick up a gun.

The theme song of the grandiose person is the tune from the Man from La Mancha (“To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, etc”).

When I suggested to a writer friend that tech writers are grandiose, she looked at me like I was crazy (a look that overtly grandiose people get used to). She said, “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

I said, “No, no. Think about it. Don’t technical writers end up knowing more than anyone else? Don’t we have a better grasp of the product, the process?”

“Well sure, “ she acknowledged. “I have always said that tech writers know the process better than anybody. We have seen it all.”

“That’s it,” I said “That’s what I’m getting at. In our secret lives, we know that we are special. We are quietly grandiose - some of us anyway.”

She muttered, “They never give us credit for knowing anything.” And we moved on to another topic.

I should have told her a story.

Like many of my stories it goes back to the Time Of The Beginning when we were all working for Burroughs at the old Charlotte Merchandise Mart on East Independence. This was before we had split up into the Tootsie Room and the Pseudo Supervisors’ Rooms. We were in a big open space separated from one another by pieces of cardboard cut from packing crates. Paul Seid sat in his modified box. John Yankech used a section of his box to cover his desk like an awning.

It is John that I am talking about.

He was writing the Burroughs Hospital Information System (BHIS) Environmental Software Manual. Today it might be called an architecture guide. It described the underside of the system. How all the pieces fit together. The thing was - until John wrote his document nobody understood the whole thing. This expert or that might know how one piece worked and interfaced with a few other pieces. But nobody knew it all. John was blazing new ground. He became The Expert. He was The One.

The work was agonizingly slow; some days he wrote no more than a paragraph. But that was always a special moment. Filled with his own grandeur, John would announce to the room of technical writers - trolls hidden under and inside cardboard boxes, “Great Shit!”

And we basked in his glory, rising up momentarily from our boxes, knowing that we too were something else. That despite the odds, despite what the others might think about us, despite the lack of respect - despite the fact that we might not have the courage or inclination to pursue greatness, we were great.

That is what I mean by the secret grandiosity of technical writers.