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Subject:RE: Are you using personas? From:"Gary S. Callison" <huey -at- interaccess -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 Jan 2003 16:22:44 -0600 (CST)
On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, JPosada -at- book -dot- com (John Posada) wrote:
> Hey! I GET it now. In fact, I tell people that the audience for the Run
> book I just created was for Igor, the 3rd shift Network Operations
> Center Technician who's been on the job for a week and the network
> crashes at 4am.
> Now I need a face...
While I wrote an awful lot of documentation there, my last job was
ostensibly as a 3rd shift network operations center technician for a
backbone provider. If you need to put a face to your persona, here's a
picture of your 3rd-shift NOC monkey being mauled by a vicious killer pit
bull: <http://www.hyacinthine.net/Pets/Bikkit/P1010006.JPG>.
The NOC is a great place for tech writers to cross-train, if you get the
chance. A good ops-room guy has to know more than a little about a huge
number of things, and be able to see how it all integrates. The individual
procedures are mostly very small and very simple, but there's a huge
number of them, and the problem identification tree can be pretty
staggering when you're looking at the whole thing. The process of
documenting such a huge tangle of legacy (an IT word meaning "so arcane
that nobody here knows how it works, but it appears to be working NOW, so
just don't screw with it") equipment and heterogeneous platforms and
networks is a fabulous challenge - and lots of fun in the right environment.
Then throw in two or three simultaneous catastrophic failures, on a
weekend when you're solo-shifting and you have no backup, and even the
most redundant failure-proofed systems can get all cubist-over-teakettle.
That can be exhilarating also, in a skidding-out-of-control sort of way.
--
Huey
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A new book on Single Sourcing has been released by William Andrew
Publishing: _Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation_
is now available at: http://www.williamandrew.com/titles/1491.html.
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