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RE: Microsoft wants journalists, not tech writers?
Subject:RE: Microsoft wants journalists, not tech writers? From:MList -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 Oct 2003 11:28:05 -0500
From: John Posada [mailto:john1 -at- tdandw -dot- com]
> What I meant was, did their peers publicly flog them as a
> pre-emptive move, "outing" them upon finding out internally,
> or did they jump on them only after they were revealed by
> those outside, hoping that they wouldn't be caught in the
> first place.
Ahh. Well, I suspect that there are several things involved
there, just as there would be within a technical writing department.
There are bosses and policies, so a cow-orker* who discovers that
another has been lyin' in print is not able to unilaterally
go public. There are channels.
Charges and suspicions do need to be investigated and considered
by department heads. After all, they might not necessarily be
true. Cow-orkers have been known to shaft each other over
personal and other issues, after all. As bad as it is to have
professional indiscretions made public, it can be easily as
bad to crucify someone on grounds that later turned out to be
spurious. That's lucrative-lawsuit country.
I'm sure there was lots of self-interested foot-dragging (the
accounts of some of those careers confirm that), but there's
also the understandable reticence of a colleague floundering
to do the right thing when something ugly crawls out from under
a rock. It might not be as bad as child-molesting, where the
accusation (whether later refuted or not) is the death sentence,
but it's still rather irrevocable to go public on accusations
of professional malfeasance.
Just sayin' they aren't necessarily all two-faced wh**es. :-)
/kevin
(*) Hey, don't yell at me about that spelling. This is how they
write it over on the Copyeditors mailing list. :-)
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