One of my friends on and off the Internet recently posted a question in her journal: What do our kids think we do all day? Until she asked, I hadn’t given it a great deal of thought, really. I’d ask my kids what they did at school or daycare most days, and they would answer in an age-appropriate fashion. As they got older, I’d be asked what I did at work in return.
I tend to keep my answers simple and parallel to their experiences: “I spoke on the phone with my co-workers, I went to meetings to talk about work, I wrote my work using the computer, had lunch, and missed you kids.” I have a book about “what authors do” on my Amazon to-buy list, but it doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill. “See, son, this is what I do, but instead of rhyming silly words, I format and validate command line parameters for a small audience of high-level administrators of medium- to large-scale server farms.” Not exactly driving up in a large fire truck, sirens blazing, when someone dials 911. My emergencies are more along the lines of a document not formatting correctly when saved in ASCII instead of UTF-8 … and it needs to be uploaded before 5pm.
But while home sick for a week with my oldest child, a little television show by the name of Wow, Wow, Wubsy provided a fantastically age-appropriate explanation for what it is I do actually do all day for months on end.
My friend’s daughter explained her mom’s job this way: “My mom’s a lawyer. She helps make things fair.” She explains her job to her daughter with a little more detail about helping people work things out fairly, but it’s a great introduction to her profession, even if she doesn’t burst into rooms, stethoscope and tongue depressor at the ready, or roll out a thousand sugar cookies before six in the morning.
The episode in question, Attack of the 50-Foot Fleegle, is a work of absurdity, as most children’s shows are, but gets across a bit of a lesson in a non-preachy way. Don’t buy unknown black-market carnivorous furry animals that have fallen off of the back of a truck and feed it candy. Wait, that wasn’t it. Oh, yes; I remember now: Read the Fleegling Manual (RTFM).
The episode wandered along, with all of the child-styled characters buying and caring for pets in a peer-pressured orgy of fuzzy pet buying. Wubsy, wanting to fit in, buys one himself, but tosses the manual on the care and feeding of his Fleegle. He feeds it candy, gets bored and falls asleep. Predictably to adult viewers, the Fleegle grows and grows into a menace that only his friends can help him tame with the help of … wait for it … user manuals!
Bingo! There, son, that’s what I do all day. I write manuals so that people know how to feed and care for their computer programs! When they do it right, they usually don’t have to deal with 50-Foot crash messages, or need to soak their terminals in carrot juice. As long as they generally remember to always Read the Fleegling Manual, and how and when to ask for help (but that’s another episode)!
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