talking of slough…

One brilliant sitcom to come out of the uk (one of many, obviously) is The Office. Class.

And then they took it to America and butchered it. I know Americans who love it. For me though, watching it is like having my eyelids forcibly pulled apart and stabbing dirty butter knives into my eyes.

And yet I now hear they intend to bring it to Israel and do an Israeli version. But there is no Israeli like Gareth. Everyone’s been in the army for a start. No-one has a company pub quiz night. No comic relief. And nobody here would ever put someone else’s stapler into jelly. Its doomed to fail already.

Having said that, there is plenty of material to make an extremely funny sitcom out of being a technical writer at a big American corporation in Israel. For example, a typical day starts like this:


Oh yes. I work in a department where the “start up” mentality reins supreme. Its all about fires, covering our asses, and damage control. Usually in documentation because I am the last pit stop.
Example: I pulled this off last year’s Stupidest Things Ever Said wall calendar:


This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. The “oops shit, we’ve already programmed it and closed the application” thought. Quickly followed by “it’ll be ok, we’ll cover our asses in documentation”.

And while you may snigger, I see this and feel the TW’s pain. This is what they’re doing while they’re professionally massaging the text so that it resembles some sort of sane and logical grammatically correct English: …mumble mumble…This is sooooo stupid…mumble mumble…ruining our reputation…mumble mumble…gonna look like fools…mumble mumble…FOOLS, I tell you! …mumble mumble…Feckin IDIOTS…mumble mumble…Bunch of fucking fuckwits…

And later, getting a coffee while PDFing the offensive document: …mumble mumble…IDIOTS!!!!

For more material, remind me next time to tell you all about Israel’s technical writing conventions!!!!