[Elecraft] No RTFM

[Tony Estep]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Dave KK7SS <kk7ss at frontier.com> wrote:

> A loong time ago (>30 years!) I was instructed to write a manual...I was of
> the personal opinion that this would never be fully read if at all...


Ah, I was once a manual writer. I ran out of money while going to college
and took a job writing manuals for a small engineering firm that made
transistor testers for Texas Instruments. Later, after I went back and
finished school, I was looking for a job and applied at a big electronics
company in St. Louis. The guy who interviewed me informed me that most of
the applicants had submitted writing samples that were unintelligible, and
the few whose writing passed muster couldn't figure out how the equipment
worked, so they didn't know what to say. He unrolled a huge, blue-line,
hand-drawn schematic and pointed to one of the stages. "What's that?" he
demanded. "Schmitt trigger," sez I. Whereupon he jumped up and began
gleefully pumping my hand. "Hooray!"

But after I got home and thought about it, I realized that the last thing in
the world I wanted to do was to write those manuals, and I wound up going in
a completely opposite direction.

Tony KT0NY