No Thought

By which I mean, not planning this post out ahead of time. By which I also mean, I seem to have little to no brain left for my job. A significant portion of this job entails going through and digesting draft technical documents that are by no means ready for major customers, compelling people who supposedly know stuff to review them and provide me feedback, and then updating the damn things in time for product launch. This does not make me a technical writer. Being a technical writer is easy because you don't have to understand the material more than enough to create grammatical sentences that the engineers can nod over and say, I thought I said that. I have to put techie shit together that has nothing to do with grammar but will make sense a year from now when some hapless engineer in the PRC designs a feature into his product, reads the documentation, and suddenly realizes that these register descriptions here contradict those register descriptions there and how's he supposed to write his firmware, while on the same day across the strait in the ROC some other hapless engineer reports that a couple I/O pins don't act in reset like we say they do and it's delaying his entry to market, quick, what's the workaround? My job is to prevent that by getting it right in the first place, and that's hard, because the people who designed the thing didn't update their notes when someone implemented a design change notice, or the notes were lost, and I have no idea who to ask anyway, and the chief architect is off in strategy meetings in Bangalore for the week and not returning emails. So of course what I'm really supposed to do is sift through the documents we do have and sort of figure it all out for myself from the subtle clues unearthed by my bitchin' Adobe Reader searching skills and replies to stupid off the wall questions sent out to random people whom it occurs to me to ask, all mixed in with my alleged knowledge of computer architecture, and that requires brain, and I don't have any more.

Hence the title. And I have so much more to say but I just looked at the time. Gotta go! Got plans!