Category: Personal
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The Teddy Bear Principle
In September 2020, I received an email. Somewhere in the middle was a story about how a university professor solved enquiries before he received them. By keeping a teddy bear outside his office. Attached to it was a sign, “Ask Teddy”. Anyone that did enter the office, however, was asked, “What did Teddy say? What […]
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Success? Or Failure? Or Fulfilment?
I am writing occasionally in response to Dangerous Meredith‘s Advent Creativity prompts. Her latest is derived from her pamphlet called The Right Questionand poses the following questions which I’ve answered as a poet and trainer (and technical writer) ‘cos they overlap and are unveiling… “How important are the following to you when you assign values […]
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May You Ever (A Response to May You Never)
I wrote a response to Meredith Lewis’ prompt May you never which details how I stopped writing poetry for years. But how I returned can only be described as a subtle gentling. In every role, whether programmer or system manager or desktop support or service manager, I was always writing whether diaries for recollection and […]
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May You Never…
I am writing occasionally in response to Dangerous Meredith‘s Advent Creativity prompts. Her latest is titled, May You Never and this quote will suffice: “Today’s challenge is for you to cast your mind back and locate, in your memory, someone who unfairly or unhelpfully sneered at your efforts.“ I heard my daughter’s Elise’s giggle first. […]
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The Creativity Thing
I have been inspired by Meredith Lewis’ Advent Calendar and today’s most so which is on creativity Meredith’s Advent Calendar. This is my best response… I can still hear her voice in my head. Although long ago she would have sent away mine, unfortunately. She had spend the last 45 minutes describing her failed novel […]
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Short Run
Again. I drew my hand close, splayed my fingers wide and pressed down hard. On my shoulder. I pivoted and turned left, facing the scorers. “Short run, ” I intoned, making sure my voice carried off field. Somewhere in the distance, a head raised and lowered. Perhaps a pen moved scratching paper, hopefully. I turned […]
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Help the helpers
“Daddy? What is it you do again?” My daughter looked up from her drawing and fixed me with her questioning stare. You can’t explain what I do to a four year old. Even one who had watched me all morning: resetting passwords, setting up new users, installing software, checking performance reports,etc. Saying “I’m a system […]
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Version Control
It began as an easy and fairly innocuous job. The only downside was that it had to be finished by Monday. But I was just the technical writer and my role was secondary. Or so I thought. The content was being emailed to me by another person. A communications document for a new software implementation. […]
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Copy and Paste
The greatest public humiliation I experienced was at the hands of an ex-wife and her then boyfriend. But that didn’t prepare me for my greatest workplace humiliation (also known as the copy and paste incident). It occurred during a meeting. I was presenting the changes I had made to an intranet to a group of […]
Andrew James Whalan 