RE: Username or user name (generalized)

[stevefjong -at- comcast -dot- net]

Thank you for your collective pick-me-up! I had basically reached the point where I was wondering if I was nuts or not. Based on your responses, I'm happy to say I'm not. I'm also not the first one in this doc group to have reached the point of questioning his own sanity, but that's another story, and I don't think the 2,500 of you want to hear it 8^) I will answer a few of your questions and try to end this thread gracefully.
 
The root problem is a combination of Conway's Law (as Gene Kim-Eng suggested) plus a certain waspish exasperation on the part of our editor with the resulting differences and shifts around the edges of the interface. (Bonnie Granat, you nailed it.) That one button I cited really does say "UPDATE" when it should be "Update;" unfortunately, we've now spent more time and effort arguing over how I should refer to it in text than in telling the developer to fix it. (John Posada asks where we stop once we introduce the concept that sloppiness is OK. I think the answer is that as long as we're consistent, sloppiness is all Ok. I hope things don't go that far...)
 
A year and a half ago, the department policy was perfectly normal: Match the software, and if it's wrong, try to get it fixed. It changed around the time of the last major release, when the names of all forms and subsections labels were changed to uppercase. Ironically, the interface is in its own way quite consistent; we just don't like the look in text of the many shouted references to the SECTION NAME section of the FORM NAME form (and I agree that it looks bad). When the forms changed, the Help writer and I changed all the references in our documents; the others did not. Now we have collectively stamped our feet (as Lou Quillio observed) and said, in effect, 'I don't care what the engineers do any more, This Way is right and so we're going to do it This Way.' I've changed my 500-page book (and the Help writer changed his 1500 topics). I'm sympathetic, really I am, and it only took me a day to make the changes. To Bonnie's point, I think our intent is to make us look good: 'See? We know what's right, and we're consistent.' I just think that, in changing the various references in my text and tables to title case, and in referring to the odd button the way it ought to be, I have marred my book by separating it, to a small but measurable degree, from the reality of the product I'm documenting.
 
To John Posada's suggestion that I make them "try to stop me," I did, and it ended badly. Collaboration is highly valued here, though perhaps misdefined; I discovered the hard way that resisting an editorial change (even from a peer reviewer) is non-collaborative. Like David Chinell, I argued that what I was asked to do looked unprofessional; our manager counterargued with the word "insubordination," which I found highly persuasive. From that point on I've made all the changes I could stomach.
 
Thanks to you guys, at least I know I'm not being anal retentive. I will now sign off and write an e-mail asking that the UPDATE button be fixed.

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