I’ve been looking forward to simply throwing myself into the tasks of my second job, to experience the simple rush of knowing that hours have dripped by as you’ve been engaged in a battle of wits with a piece of unthinking, unfeeling silicon or stitching together the work others in a novel way to solve a problem.  Instead, I descended into a world of obscurantist one upsmanship.

The first iteration of the software I was using had a detailed but broken setup that clocked in at about 4 pages.   The main page had a “use this instead” link that led to a piece with 2 pages or so of instruction.  This page also had a “windows users, get the latest and use this” which led to a page with another piece of software with a 1/2 page of instructions which wasn’t too revealing.  I did some Googling and found an update for that suite which by far had the best documentation: A text file with four lines of text, of which 2 referred to folders that didn’t exist in the download or that referred to a file not created as part of the operating process.  You win, French programmer’s documentation guy.