Pat Dales has been Secretary of the Toronto Chapter of the STC for the last three years. Before joining the Toronto chapter, she edited the Vancouver Island chapter's newsletter for two years. This experience gave her great respect for the work of newsletter editors in volunteer organizations. In her professional life, she's a contract technical communicator in the IT sector, with particular experience in the database and telecommunications fields.
Her interest in technical communication developed while she worked as a developer in the SQL/DS area of the IBM lab in Toronto. She was the primary reviewer of the SQL/DS programmers' guide and a secondary reviewer of the SQL reference manual. She found both those activities quite fascinating. Therefore, during a year's leave of absence on the West Coast, she earned a diploma in technical communication from Simon Fraser University and used that to get her first technical writing job with a (very) small software development company in Victoria. Since then, she has held technical writing positions with Triant Technologies, IBM, CIBC and Rogers Wireless.
Pat's roots are in Western Canada - the prairies to be precise - but she loves Toronto and has done so from the moment she stepped off the train in Union station shortly after graduating from university. However, she still loves driving vacations spent meandering through the prairie's odd and isolated little places.
Communication Times: Thanks for chatting with us. Without giving away anything confidential, what are you currently working on?
Pat Dales: My current contract is with Rogers Wireless where my primary responsibility is maintaining the system documentation for the Customer Care and Billing system. As time permits, I create procedural documentation for internal users and, over the next little while, I'll have a chance to pull together a library of training documentation, also for internal users.
CT: Tell us about something good, bad, interesting, or weird that has happened to you on the job recently.
PD: My life at Rogers is pretty quiet, but I have a couple of small stories.
Rogers recently moved its IT departments to the old Nortel building in Brampton. On my first day in the new building, a coworker advised me that I would have to build travel time into all my meeting plans because the building is so large. She was right!! In fact, the building is a bit like a high rise on its side with street names instead of floor numbers.
CT: The building has street names?
PD: Yes.
The move to the Brampton facility was staged over several months, and the group I was assigned to move with was among the last to go. The groups sitting closest to me, though, moved much earlier, and other departments started to fill the available spaces. The department that moved in around me was marketing and, to my surprise, I found the hubbub of marketing very pleasant - so different from IT.
CT: Can you share any good advice about technical communications that you've gotten or overheard recently?
PD: These are the approaches that I've observed or found are the most important:
CT: Tell us about any interesting new technology you've seen recently.
PD: TiddlyWiki. It is one of the technologies used in one of our Web site design contest entries and it looks fascinating. When the contest is over, I would like to talk to the contestant to find out how TiddlyWikis work and how to use them.
CT: Tell us about a good speaker you've heard recently.
PD: I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Jack Molisani speak at a chapter meeting about the ten most common mistakes people make when looking for a job. One of his points was particularly interesting: failing to form personal relationships with recruiters means they may just not remember you when they're trying to fill positions.
CT: Tell us about a good book or article you've read recently.
PD: I'm reading Joann Hackos' book Managing Your Documentation Projects, which I'm hoping will help me meet the challenges of managing documentation projects. A lot of what she says is common sense and a lot is common project management practice, but it's helpful to have it focussed on documentation projects.
CT: Assuming that you actually have some down time, what are you doing for fun these days?
PD: I'm lucky. I do have down time and I love eating out, going to movies and concerts, shopping on Queen St. and at the St. Lawrence market, walking - the usual urban pastimes. I especially like visiting the AGO late at night (well, 11:00 pm or midnight) on those occasions when they stay open late. I thought Nuit Blanche was fabulous.
CT: Great! Thanks again for talking with us.