A long pointless story of my previous life.

I use to work for a company that a piece of software that I helped the customers learn how to use. I was around for the inception of the software and spent a lot of time with the people working on it, testing, criticizing, I mean, critiquing, trying to break things etc. It started as a very small company so I did a wide variety of things. Mostly the company was split into Sales, Engineers and Me. I was the none of the above. One of my values was that I was good with explaining how to use things to customers.

Because of this I also wrote the help files. You know, click on the little (?) and a box pops up with a quick description, I did that. 100’s of them. Then that turned into writing the manual, and then of course keeping it updated. So I worked on this for years. It was 100 pages of my words and pictures.

At some point we suddenly became a big company (investment group – blah) and a Product Manager was brought in. The very first time I met this wonder of a person was in a meeting to discuss all the things that she should prioritize. So here I am sitting in this office, and mostly silent, just listening, I am after at that point an out of town visitor from the “Other” office. And this software manual comes up. Someone asks her if she’s had time to review it. They were asking if she had a working knowledge of the software yet but she instead took it as, what do you think of it? Her response was “Meh, it is what it is”. At which point my eyes rolled back in my head and I may have blacked out.

So every time for the last 15 years any time someone offhandedly and stupidly says “it is what it is” I just picture the short career of Sharon Yen.