The Cyclone Release

(Continued)

He heard laughter a few cubicles down, then voices, then the tapping of keys on keyboards. Young engineers, ten or twelve years younger than Brendon, who had built the system now glowing in front of him.

The system was called SmartEOL. Large manufacturing companies used it to discontinue complex products: to “bring them to an orderly end-of-life,” and remove them from the price list. It sounded simple, but it turned out to be incredibly complicated, as the young engineers had discovered when they started automating it. General Electric, for instance, couldn’t just pop up one day and say, We’re not selling this critical care ventilator anymore. They couldn’t do that because there would be thousands of those ventilators out there, in thousands of hospitals, and tens of thousands of neonatal, infant, and pediatric care nurses who had been trained to use them. These hospitals would have bought maintenance contracts and spare parts, and may have put in orders for more. To ensure babies didn’t die, GE had to give hospitals fair warning before they stopped selling and servicing a ventilator. They had to be told, well in advance, This is your last chance to buy this model…, This is your last chance to get support…, This is your last chance to get spare parts…, etc. And SmartEOL was built to automate all of that.

It was this underlying humanity that drew Brendon to his work. Complex systems like SmartEOL were designed and built for important, sometimes critical, purposes, but they weren’t any good if people couldn’t use them. This was the technical writer’s job.

As he often did at the start of a project, Brendon began to imagine the real people who would use SmartEOL. He imagined a product manager at Hewlett-Packard, a man he named Jake, in his fifties, perhaps, who had started his career when there were paper forms on everyone’s desks instead of computers, a man who would look at SmartEOL with disdain, another stupid computer thing forced on him by some unfeeling chief something officer. He imagined a financial analyst, Jane, a single mother with a sick kid at home and a butt-head for an ex, a cog in the wheel of a farm equipment manufacturer in Omaha who would use SmartEOL to generate reports, more spreadsheets to add to the dozens of spreadsheets she would examine and manipulate and condense each week. And he imagined an IT tech at a little parts manufacturer in Austin, a Mexican immigrant he named Rodrigo, who had bussed tables to work himself through a community college program and land his sweet job in an air-conditioned cubicle where he backed up databases, monitored the network, and set up the new SmartEOL user accounts for product managers like Jake.

Jake, Jane, and Rodrigo were his audience. What would they need to know?

Turning back to the screen, he looked again at the interface, and the wave:

Create. Submit. Review. Approve. Announce.

So simple and clean.

And then he saw the Help button in the upper right of the screen. This would be his world. He clicked, and a pop-up screen appeared. “Start Page,” it said at the top, and his mind immediately started working through the details engineers would never think about. Is start page the right term? Would it paint him into a corner later? Should it be screen instead of page? A page is a web site. It just shows information. A screen is an application. It lets you enter data, interact, modify, manipulate.

And the rest of the text in the pop-up, careless verbiage slammed out by an engineer at two in the morning, made it clear why Janela needed a tech writer, after all. “When you want to EoL a product,” it said, “start on this screen.” So, in the title, it was a page, but in the body, it was a screen. And the acronym EoL was used as a verb. When you want to end of life… That term, end of life, struck Brendon suddenly, bringing on a feeling of emptiness that was familiar to him by now. He sat with it for a moment—no sense pushing on it, he had learned—then re-engaged with the screen.

To the engineers, using EoL as a verb was natural, like who cares, but to Brendon, it had the feeling of a very bad habit, a threat to the language. He immediately started thinking of what phrase he would use instead. He was formulating a style guide and a word list in his mind. Engineers wouldn’t even know what these things were, but that was the job of the technical writer. And just these few words in front of Brendon made it clear there was plenty for him to do.

It was a relief to feel satisfied at the prospect of useful work. There’d been none of it during those lost months after Sadie’s death, just cleaning up after a life, doing something with the clothes, the jewelry, the toiletries, a forest green and gold sun dress she'd worn in the wine country, along with the magical day it conjured, relegated to the donation bin.

But now he could dismiss all that and dive in. He reached down and flipped a lever on the chair, locking it into a comfortable position, and continued exploring, making notes, planning next steps. Hours passed, during which he barely noticed the farewells and footsteps of those leaving for the night. Seeing the digital clock on his screen roll to 11:00 p.m., he realized he was exhausted, shut down his system, and made his way to the exit, seeing with some relief that many of the cubicles were dark and empty.

About The Cyclone Release

The Cyclone Release was a finalist in the Blue Moon Novel Competition, and is now available from Madville Publishing. To get updates on Bruce’s work, including this unique work of mainstream literary fiction, sign up here to be added to our mailing list.