The pretty gal, after seeing my work, said it was really neat and she thanked me several times for doing it. I found it rather amusing, that she actually thanked me for something that our team gotta deliver. I mean, yes, it was a task i assigned to her and she didn't manage to complete it by the deadline and then went on long leave. Even though it was half-done, the quality wasn't too good and i practically re-wrote most part of it. Yet, it is something that got to be done no matter who did it. Since she was not around, then of course i gotta finish it up. So i don't see why she has to be so grateful about it.
After so many late nights and sleep deprivation, i'm actually quite happy with this piece of work. I hope it has also showed to the pretty gal that what kind of quality that i expect out of our delivery. Actually all of them know that i'm a perfectionist, and i'm especially particular about documents writing. Yet, all of them have fallen short of my expectation when it comes to documentation, for technical people normally do not write well and can get quite sloppy in document formatting and such. Hopefully i've demonstrated in action of what my expectation is and they can strive to meet it.
I remember there was once i asked the programmer who had left us to draw a flowchart. After he had done it, i had a look and then gave it back to him, and asked him to fix the formatting. The content was ok, but he didn't make the arrows that flowed from one box to another straight. And so i asked him, "Why are these arrows crooked? Can you please make them straight?"
There was another time when i read a document that a consultant wrote, and i saw that she liked to use the ampersand sign in text, didn't capitalise application names such as "Excel", and used American spelling in her writing. I corrected all these and then wrote an email to everyone and told them that in formal writing, ampersand sign should only be used in proper nouns (e.g. Fish & Co.) or short-forms (e.g. B&B) or special terms (e.g. cut & paste), application names must always be written in title case, and we should write in British English because we are an UK-based company.
Sometimes i really pity them to be working under a boss who is a perfectionist. I know some of them actually do not understand why i bother about such minute details, so long as the document is readable - and half the time, nobody really cares or even reads the document in detail. But to me, every detail counts. A lot of times, how you say something is as important as what you say, and hence presentation is important too besides the content.
And seriously, it was precisely because of how meticulous i am in formal writing that the CIO took notice of me after i just joined the company for a few months. He read a document that i wrote and said it was so far the best document from the departments in the entire group (i guess it was because we are all from the IT departments and all technical people around the world are the same when it comes to documentation). That piece of document was then adapted as a sample for everyone in the group.
Now, my point is not to brag about my work here; my point is that insisting on not settling for second best does have its merit. As i've mentioned before, if we aim for perfection in the things we do, then even if we fall short of what we strive for, we are still not too far away from being perfect.
Anyway, I will hand this document back to the pretty gal, as she is supposed to be the owner of it and always keeps it updated whenever we have any changes to the program. I will tell her that she gotta maintain the same standard and do not put all my hard work to waste by not keeping the same quality of work.
(By the way, bloggig and emails are NOT formal writing. That's why you won't see the same kind of perfect writing or formatting here or in my email.)
Labels: work
