Eviscerati.org

Documentation Triage

Help Desk, by Christopher B. Wright

Comic Transcript

SCOTT: What are you up to, Mark?

MARK: Catching up on work.

MARK: While I was... Under the influence, as it were, a lot of documentation got backlogged. I'm doing triage now.

SCOTT: How are you doing that?

MARK: Based on the marketing jargon used to describe the product, I can determine how much time it's going to take to finish.

MARK: See, this email describes one of these products as a "light, dedicated process," which suggests there won't be much in the way of documentation. And here's one that "automatically configures and installs itself" -- not much in the way of an installation document, but because it won't work properly it'll have an awful lot of troubleshooting documentation.

SCOTT: Neat.

MARK: Uh-oh... This one is a "robust, configurable tool capable of handling a wide array of technical capabilities."

SCOTT: What does that mean?

MARK: It means "we just added a ton of new features, and our Tech Writer isn't going home for a long time."

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