The Curse of Docco

"I had just started to open FrameMaker when the drugs began to take hold. . ."

So starts the unpublished tale of Gonzo technical writing by the late Hunter S. Thompson, who apparently tried turning his attention to software documentation during the early 1990's. The hand-written story was found in the bottom of a case of shotgun shells that appeared on the desk of the CIO of [name removed for legal reasons], a medium-sized software company in Silicon Valley. Only a few barely legible pages survive — or perhaps are the only parts Thompson ever set down during his life.

I love stress myself, and I have learned to survive under savage and unnatural pressures. I am a stress freak. On some days it seems like I have lived in my cubicle for half my life. There is blood in this keyboard, and some of it is mine. You don't need to be paranoid in the savage, world of software: it makes you paranoid. The wolves are always there, waiting for that split-second of inattention to hurl themselves upon you and rip off steaming chunks of your flesh. I survived this hell, but only through judicious applications of drugs, alcohol, and carefully placed .45 caliber bullets. [. . .] The department manager was Bruce Hawkins, an Australian, and a true drunken bastard in the classic mold. He always referred to the department as "Docco". I hated that, but the man had a survival instinct. No matter how often we tried to get rid of him, he'd be back the next day, blood in his eye and beer on his breath. I still don't know how he survived the time I cut his brakeline (the office was at the highest point of the hill, with a long twisting road down to town). The skin-flayer of the week was the status meeting, where the tortured souls of the department were taken out for beatings and repeated humiliations. With the right mix of ether and peyote, I could survive the worst the manager had to offer. The screams I could suppress, until the hyenas started to howl, just as the [illegible] tore open and the bile spewed out. Your everyday Nervous Breakdown is nothing compared to the hopeless Craziness of a woman who woke up a team lead on the flagship product and went to bed as the new trainer for interns. This is a guaranteed overwhelming shock to the system; if you don't go insane from suddenly having to see the world from the POV of the brain-dead new intern, your mind will be churned into butter by having to crawl, head-first, with your eyes open, down a septic tank hatch, just to have a place to sleep. [ . . . ] Programmers are swine. They know it. They go out of their way to prove it. But I know how to treat 'em. You need to cut out the head swine from the herd and break him; that forces all the others to give you respect, and tell you when they fuck with your software. I favour cutting off the little toe on each foot: no head swine can keep the respect of his homies when he's unable to walk in a straight line, bouncing off partition walls and filing cabinets, wailing his distress. [ . . . ] I have always hated editors, and I like to have sport with them. They are harmless quacks in the main, but some of them get ambitious and turn predatory, especially in Silicon Valley. In Santa Cruz, I ran into a man who claimed to be Microsoft's chief editor. "I consult with Bill Gates constantly," he told me. He produced a business card and gave it to me. "I can do things for you," he said. "I am a player." I took his card and examined it carefully for a moment, as if I couldn't quite read the small print. But I knew he was lying, so I leaned toward him and slapped him sharply in the nuts. Not hard, but very quickly, using the back of my hand and my fingers like a bullwhip, yet very discreetly. He let out a hiss and went limp, unable to speak or breathe. I smiled casually and kept on talking to him as if nothing had happened. "You filthy little creep," I said to him. "I am Bill Gates!" That was the tone of my workdays in Silicon Valley: violence, joy, and constant Mexican music. [ . . . ] The one I knew I had to keep my eye on was the office intern, a pimple-faced whelp whose reptilian gaze and inability to sweat marked him as potentially deadly. I pistol-whipped him on his second day, just to keep him off-guard. His life revolved around TV and relentless masturbation. Deprive him of one and he collapsed. That was the key; showing him that you had to power to destroy him. Vaya con dios, amigo. I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma. [. . .] Why bother with technical writing, if this is all they offer? Hawkins was right. The writers are a gang of cruel faggots. Technical writing is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the basement of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and wank off like a monkey in a zoo cage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The preceding post is complete fiction, derived in very large part from the works of the late Hunter S. Thompson. Don't sue me!