Re: Asking for Author Credit In The Documentation?
Many years ago, Prime Computer (remember them?) gave authors a byline on
certain highly visible manuals. The idea, IIRC, was to motivate people to to
a better job by making them personally and publicly accountable for their
work.
...
Personally, I don't like the idea of being too visible. If your name is in
there, SOMEONE with an obscure question will find you, three years after
you've forgotten all you ever know about the product, and hound you for an
answer. Been there!
You'll find my name on some of those Prime manuals. We had a
really super bunch of tech writers there, in part from our weird
policy of interviewing as a tech writer anybody with a PhD in
**anything** who applied to the company for any kind of employment.
(Had a lot of trouble getting that notion past HR, we did!)
An unofficial part of the tech-writer job interview was to ask the
candidate to name a favorite science-fiction writer and to sing a
song from a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Some of Prime's tech pubs
crew are still in touch with each other, and most of us are still
weird.
Yes, there were the occasional phone calls from users. Olive
Osmond found my name in the manual and called me from Utah. She
needed help with the Prime Computer she had bought. (This was
back before the PC.) You've seen her kids Donny & Marie's on
TV. She passed away this past May.
Then there were the letters from distraught users trying to get
their hands on manuals. Seems manuals didn't always get shipped
to crucial places. A librarian at the University of Lae in Papua
New Guinea asked for a manual, but had no way to pay for it. I
sent him one from my personal stash, and asked him to send us a few
neat-looking postage stamps or old magazines. Got stamps with
turtles on them, and Air New Guinea in-flight magazines. Gave us
a taste of reading Pidgin. "Kain de balus i kamap long," means
"weather at the destination airport." Literally, "kind day aircraft
he come up far-away." "Missi bilong balus" is a stewardess.
We learned that the policy for sending out orders for manuals was
to put them into the bundle or truck for the particular destination.
When the bundle or truck eventually filled up, the manual was sent.
Dilbert's boss hasn't discovered this method of saving money yet,
but he's still a bit behind the times, not quite up there with
Prime.
Some might wonder if having the writer's name on the manual would
make it easier for the competition to steal the best writers. We
found that it was the opposite. The best writers came to Prime
because it was a chance to gain some much-needed recognition that
the competition never offered.
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