Hazard brings technical writer to tears

I have written my fair share of tirades—in blog entries, in articles, in annoying emails to colleagues—about the use and misuse of language in the workplace. I’ve written and thought enough to exhaust the subject, yet every time I come across another misspelled word I’m sucked right back into the  Canadian v. America v. British debate.

It was in one of these moments last week that got me up from my cubicle to wander through the office in search of someone who might entertain me for a few minutes while I recovered from finding that particularly troublesome Canadian noun “licence.”

This word is always sneaking his way into our software documentation as the Canadian verb “license” and I’ve grown weary of initiating discussions about it, but because my job requires me to use it correctly on the page, I’ve also grown increasingly irritated. Hence my dilemma: Misspell the word so that the documentation matches the software, or spell it correctly and rest easy and let the user believe that the mistake is mine.

As I wandered around the office killing time, I noticed that the only employee with a dictionary on his desk was Bob, our  maintenance guy. Not one business analyst or programmer had a dictionary on his/her desk. But, the guy who didn’t deal with words all day long did.

Kudos to you, dude, I said to the cubicle wall. Now, here’s a guy, who spends his day unplugging toilets and changing light bulbs, and he cares enough about the Canadian English language to have a Canadian Oxford Dictionary on his desk. And it’s a hardcover, not a namby-pamby abridged version in paperback.

And that’s when I noticed it.

Leaning against his cubicle were was a stack of yellow, plastic signs. The warnings about “wet floors” had been covered with a customized paper sign.

The sign, typed neatly in 72-point, bold Arial typeface, politely cautioned against the “hazzard” of a slippery surface.

Oh, the humanity.

I returned to my desk and wept.