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Document how much more time you're going to need to implement the required
changes, tell them, and get back to work. (You may need to make it clear to
them that it's really a very bad idea to run through documentation with
automatic search-and-replace, no matter *how* sure you are that the changes
you make can't impact on anything else. They may have this idea that you can
do it all in half an hour.)
Comment:
For what it's worth, I simply replied to any request "I'll do what I can."
If it was reasonable, I did it. If it was unreasonable, it simply didn't get
done. In the ten years that I have been in Technical Writing, I have seldom
had anyone question why such changes hadn't been made to the documentation.
On the rare occasions that I have been questioned, I simply replied that the
changes took place too late in the development cycle to get into the
documentation, and that the changes would be reflected next release (which
they always did). Sometimes I got lucky, and they changed the names of
programs back to their original names before I ever got them changed in the
documentation.
The moral of this story is (sadly): Management seldom reads the
documentation or cares what is in it. Do your job to the best of your
ability, and don't complain (that's the only thing they won't put up with.)
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