Sometimes, I wonder why I have a blog. I wonder why I go through all the trouble of actually setting one up. I never was a big a fan of writing anything. This isn’t because I don’t know how. It isn’t because I think I sound stupid when I do. Quite frankly, I feel like the writing that I do is very intelligent and hopefully thought-provoking.
We have a couple of people who are helping out trying to create a knowledge base for our department. Unfortunately, these two ladies aren’t service desk engineers such as my peers and myself. This means that we are the ones who have to try and generate all this content. This obviously doesn’t go over well with my peers as they feel it might take away from their work. I, on the other hand, didn’t really like the idea for another reason…
I JUST DON’T LIKE WRITING DOCUMENTS!
For those who may or may not know me, I do have a developer’s background. As a developer, you deal with lines and lines of code written by either yourself or other people. When that starts to happen, its very easy to get lost and you would need a way to keep track of what was going on in the code. This is where comments and documentation come in. Even for people who may be new to coding, having comments could really make a real daunting task seem extremely easy if you are successfully pointed in the right direction.
Same goes for technical support. For those technically savvy enough to brave the wiles of the internet, you can find anything you need documented. I’m not going to say all of them are great or even complete, but there is documentation for them.
This brings me back to the two ladies at work. We had a meeting where they discussed how well I was adopting the new knowledge base program. They showed me all the data they had collected on me in regards to the number of cases I was handling/closing and the number of documents I was creating about the cases or documents that I may have referenced in regards them. We can say that those numbers were not that high at all and I wasn’t very surprised. My main goal at work is to get work done. Writing documentation wasn’t really on the job description when I “applied” or interviewed. Then again, that process happened so fast, I’m not sure what was actually happening.
Once I delivered my documentation backstory to the ladies, they let me know that they weren’t too concerned about the numbers at the beginning, cited that its always going to be a slow process at the beginning. We all knew what the real reason was (read: 2nd paragraph), but knew better than to acknowledge it in fear of starting another debate. She did ask me a question that actually got me thinking about my writing in general.
She noticed that I was talking so much about starting a blog (read: rebooting this one). Knowing this, she asked me the following:
“If you don’t like writing, why do you have a blog?”
Then, like in the movies, that tunnel vision effect happens as I realized that she actually had a point. I just really didn’t have an answer and I still don’t. I guess I’ll just have to keep writing to figure why I don’t…
-Just Sayin’