March 26, 2024

Drudgery? Not for me.

On the first day of my first ‘proper’ job, my boss took me round the place, introducing me to all the people I’d be interacting with in my role as a Technical Publications Assistant.

There was the CAD team who produced the designs for the trains, the engineers who would write the text, the draughtsmen who produced the final drawings, and the typing pool who would write everything up.

Later, he took me to see the production lines where all the electrical components for trains were built, and then the Metro Cammell factory in Birmingham that built carriages and bogies, and put the whole trains together, with our components on board. So I could see the whole context of what I was doing.

My job was the assembly and maintenance of ‘temporary’ manuals for trains delivered, and being commissioned before final hand-over. I reviewed new engineering text for clarity – in particular for non-native English speakers, and requested changes if necessary. Once I had the text, I would assemble the relevant section of the temporary manual with CAD diagrams and text, to go out to the client’s engineers. These could be brand new sections of a new manual, or re-issues of sections that had to be re-written in line with design changes requested during commissioning.

My job was what many of those people would have regarded as drudgery. The boring bits that took them away from designing circuitry, or writing, or producing beautiful technical drawings.

But it wasn’t drudgery for me.

I got to see the whole process from beginning to end. I joined the dots, turning all those outputs into something useful – a set of documents that were useful enough to enable our clients to successfully run and maintain the trains we built for them, and easily enough produced for us to be able to deliver them when the clients needed them – when they first took delivery of the trains.

I wasn’t in that job long. There wasn’t enough of this kind of work to be done, so I ended up doing data-entry – wrestling data from people who didn’t want to share it. Plus the politics of the place were horrendous. It made me miserable, so I left.

But, looking back, I think it was there that I absorbed some of the things that have informed my work ever since – customer focus, the importance of big-picture context, seeing the process and recognising when good enough for current need is far better than perfection never delivered.

Discipline makes Daring possible.