Sometimes the guardians of grammar, knights of knowledge, and captains of communications feel alone in a vast universe of unthinking peasants who should be much more appreciative of their sacrifices. At which point we remind ourselves of a truly great piece of advice tendered almost 20 years ago. “It is better to be alone than wish you were.” Aloneness is often a quality best appreciated after it’s lost.
The reality of our vast universe is that those ignorant peasants aren’t … not really. They have a different set of priorities, ambitions, and agenda, on which content for content’s sake never makes an appearance. Most of the ones we run across these days are really quite bright, friendly, and energetic. They don’t think like content mavens, because they’re more likely to be code jockeys, bean counters, drill sargeants and starry-eyed, entry-level admins. While we may entreat Scotty to beam us up during those moments of over exposure to the non-content focused hordes, it does pay to remember that what we do helps them do what they do, even if they never know. And as long as the bi-weekly direct deposits continue to show up in the checking account, we can learn to be OK with it.
We’ll get our opportunities to sit around the campfire with the other intrepids of our profession, sharing horror stories and grand adventures with an audience that actually gets us. In the meantime, it helps to appreciate the aloneness and the exposure to the peasants as two sides of the content coin.
We did find more than a few flickers from campfires kindled by the tech comm, customer experience and content strategy troop leaders whose badges humble us mere mortals, including:
- Putting enterprise content where people work
- Estimating Part 2 – Using a Dependency Calculator
- Vive Le Prototype
If you’re ready for some s’mores, join us at the campfire over at Tech Writer This Week.
