My next computer company job and really learning the ropes VIII

Unfortunately maintaining my freelance role hadn’t been completely possible. The sales director wanted me to continue with him, but apparently William, vice president, also thought I would benefit from taking on some more responsibilities in the marketing department.

You might ask why didn’t I quit? Well, I had a bunch of shares promised me when we went on the market in about a year.

Six months later it was proving to be worst than the worst pessimist’s predictions.

“So what does the layout of a PCB board look like again? Dimensions?” I asked Bryant the technical marketing guy.

Mickey, seeing the commonsense of the engineers’ point of view had said: Yes, if marketing was now responsible for input into device features and specifications - for example whether it should have email or the color of the casing - they should also write full technical specs.

As I say I was just going to make a report on how many buttons we should have on the side of the device to improve ease-of-use – and to do so I had to complete crash courses in engineering across the board from mechanical to electrical over the last couple of months. It had been a hell of fifteen hours days and then Mickey walked over to my desk: “Hmm, Dan, finish the technical specs you are doing, but I have discussed with William and he thinks technical stuff should be left to the engineers. They are more professional. Can do a more professional job.

He hadn't finished, "Hmm, still i think you should complete them anyway."

It was bad enough that nobody wanted my specifications any more, but there was a more salient point: WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I FINISH THEM??

He then turned his attention to Bryant. “How many times do I have to ask you to change this? You really need to pay attention to what you are doing…The grammar, and I want these headings all the same size. We are supposed to be marketing - about communicating…Professional.”

Bryant’s role was even harder: In hi-tech companies in Taiwan most internal documents were written in English so Mickey, aware that he didn’t know how to do marketing, came up with a new plan to show the department had some value: he asked get Bryant to write detailed product specifications for all our products; the only problem was these specifications already existed so the only service we were offering was to make them more presentable and better organized (remember marketing in Taiwan was thought of as the department that makes everything look pretty: if you need your power point presentation to look good go to marketing, and if need someone to redesign a website don’t go to a webmaster…). Now, everyday I sat open mouthed at the stupidity of the director - who's written English was hardly perfect - getting angrier and angrier because Bryant, who was employed to test new software solutions, couldn’t perfectly punctuate an English sentence.