Several years ago I managed a training department in a company that made high tech training simulators for the military and control rooms of power plants. The delivered products included training and technical manuals for operation and maintenance of the simulator hardware and software. To enable concurrent deliveries we wrote our manuals from the same design information that the engineers used.

For a particular project I assigned a training specialist to create a manual with certain technical data. Unknown to him and myself the responsible engineer deliberately issued an obsolete version of the data, probably because he had a spare copy not yet thrown away.

I discovered the defect during my final review and begged more time from the project manager to deliver the proper book, but not more budget since I would work on it myself. My request was rejected and I met the schedule by working for free on nights and weekends.

Six months later karma presented me with an opportunity for revenge. It was common on such contracts for customers to be delivered finalized versions of all technical data approximately six months after customer acceptance testing. My department published some of those technical manuals. Our value added was to technically edit the documents so that the nomenclature, style and organization was standardized.

I found a technical description for one software program that was so badly written as to be incoherent and determined: (1) It was authored by the same engineer; (2) he was effectively illiterate in technical writing; (3) no other version existed. I inserted the illiterate document verbatim into the appendix of a related deliverable manual.

I delivered the manuscript to a particularly thorough contract administrator who always read what she issued and expressed my anxiety about the target appendix for which I had no other versions and which needed attention from the only person who could ensure technical accuracy of any needed rewrite. Approximately two days later she rejected the document and told the project manager to get the engineer to fix it.

The engineer was furious with me for including his document. After he vented on me I went to the project manager and begged that he give the engineer time to rewrite the appendix. The manager ordered the engineer to rewrite the appendix and ridiculed him for using me to beg on his behalf. After another vent on me, I again begged for more time but was figuratively ejected from of the manager’s office. The engineer vehemently demanded that I stop going to his boss. [I was only trying to get him some consideration denied to me.]

It took the illiterate engineer about three weeks to satisfy the contract administrator to whom I repeatedly expressed my empathy and gratitude perhaps once a week for making sure that only the best products were good enough to be shipped.