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Discouragement can come from many sources, including when personal goals elude our grasp or our jobs bring unpleasant surprises. I’ve discovered, however, that besides being entertaining, television and movies can sometimes give us refreshing perspectives about our jobs. On the job, I’ve never had to dodge machine-gun fire, risk my life uncovering government conspiracies, vanquish attacking vampires, or diagnose misaligned antimatter before an annoying warp-core breach atomizes everything within a cubic kilometer. With that perspective, such things as publishing software meltdowns and difficult (but fangless) coworkers don’t seem so bad anymore.
I’ve seen life-in-peril scenarios played out in countless episodes of popular culture, but I never expected to have one redefine how I looked at my job description. The television series “Bones” was about a forensic anthropologist, her colleagues, and an FBI agent who team together to solve murders. I only watched a few episodes, but I found interesting the volume and significance of technical communication that took place during the show.
In the episode “A Boy in a Bush,” Angela Montenegro, a forensic “technical artist,” becomes upset during a case involving the remains of a six-year-old boy. Among other tasks, she must reconstruct what the small corpse would have looked like in real life. She begins thinking of quitting because she feels her emotionally grueling job consists of just drawing dead people.
Her boss, however, has a different viewpoint. Doctor Goodman’s compassionate and moving response to her is: “You are the best of us, Miss Montenegro. You discern humanity in the wreck of a ruined human body. You give victims back their faces, their identities. You remind us all of why we’re here in the first place: because we treasure human life.” As Angela listens to him, her eyes fill with tears, and she hugs him. She continues in her job because an alternate perspective on her profession has given her a new vision for the indispensable importance of her job.
Most people crave having a sense of meaning in the things they do, and Angela found a new sense of meaning in her job description. Fellow technical communicators, what is the meaning in our job descriptions? No, not the paper job descriptions in H.R. filing cabinets, but the far more important ones—the ones in our hearts and minds. Psychologically and emotionally, do we merely document dead widgets? Or by concisely and accurately communicating critical information to those in need, do we serve humanity?
I know which job description I want.
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