"I have CDO...."

"...It's kind of like OCD, except the letters are in alphabetical order like they're supposed to be." ~ Unknown

True story: When I was a kid, I'd accompany my mom on her weekly grocery shopping trip and spend the entire time hovering over the candy displays by the checkout.

Scoping for shopliftables?

Nope.

Determining which cavity bomb to beg for?

Nope.

Rearranging the gum packets so everything was in the correct box and facing the right way?

Ohhhhh yeah.

(I look back now and wonder what those cashiers must have thought. Of course, it was Penner Foods, so they probably all knew exactly who I was and which Pioneer Girl merit badge I'd earned that week.)

When people find out that I'm a technical writer for a software company, they usually take a step back. Their eyes glaze over, and I get the standard, "oh. Wow. That sounds...hard."

The brave few ask what it is that I do each day. Those who know me from my former life ask me exactly how teaching college English led to software manuals.

And you know what I say?

It's pretty much the same thing (except for the whole I-read-technical-specs-and-translate-geek-into-English rather than expounding on Middlemarch. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to).

Fundamentally, what I do (and who I am, let's be honest) is about organization. It's about bringing light into darkness, playing "one of these things is not like the other," and wrapping it all up with bullets and standard headings.

It's the most satisfying job I've ever had. I take the chaos of programmer notes and transform it into easy-to-understand-and-implement procedures. I separate the wheat from the chaff and centre it under bold "What can I do?" headings.

You know, I've always appreciated the Genesis account of creation - essentially, God creates the world by organizing it.

Light? You go there. Darkness - opposite side of the room, thanks. Sky? Up. Water? Down. Land? Um, wherever there's not water, sound okay?

And once everything's where it's supposed to be, that's when the real fun begins.

Okay, let's fill up this space. Fish -into the water where you belong. Birds - that sky's looking kinda empty - you head there. Animals? Let's see...giraffes in the desert, bison in the plains, penguins in the Antarctic...that should do it.

It was Oscar Wilde who said, "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

Bollocks.

It's within the rules that creativity lies. Read a sonnet lately? It's the dancing about and around the ABAB CDCD EFEF GG that makes it ah-MAY-zing. Listened to friend Bach? It's the almost-but-not-quite-bursting out of the confines of the genre that make it grand.

Which is why I love what I do so much. Writing without boundaries gets old after awhile. Nobody says you can't, so suddenly "can" loses its meaning.

But writing with four levels of headings and two sets of bullet styles (depending on context) and specific verb forms for procedures all within a master template?

That's where the magic is, my friends.

Now, if you'll pardon me, the cans in my pantry need to be itemized.