Document Review

A few days ago, He-Who-Does-Not-Want-To-Be-Named-Here came up to me with a request. He wanted me to take a look at an official document he was reviewing, which was meant to be sent out to a client. He asked me to merely assess whether he was within his rights to throw his hands up in the air and wail in despair. (He is somewhat pacifistic. Under similar circumstances, I’d be raging to call a firing squad against the offenders)

I went. I saw. I screamed. What a load of tosh it was! I know the following lines will make me sound about a hundred and twenty years old. Yet, they must be said: in my days, people were just NOT allowed to send out such pointless nonsense. We used to strive to get the words, grammar and content right. And crisp. I am not saying it was all top notch. However it was never this terrible either. We had a sense of pride and satisfaction about a job done well.


The authors (and previous reviewers, if any), of the document I was talking about, did not seem to have bothered. There was vernacular, for cryin’ out loud! Actually, even if the authors had simply copied the content off some other similar documents submitted in the past, they would have sort of responded to the client’s questions.

But no. This bunch took it upon themselves to ‘write’ every single line anew. Now, that wouldn’t have been a problem of such great magnitude had the authors had any competence to assimilate the question, the knowledge required to answer the questions, or at least the ability to string words together to form a single sentence right.

I’ll skip the technicalities and illustrate with an imaginary example. (However please note that my brain simply is unable to get the hang of Butler English. So, that aspect is mostly missing from the illustration.)

A direct question, “What is your name?”, would have the following response. “We know it is very important for a person to have a name. A name is like an unique identifier which could be used to call or refer to a person. It is given to a person when he is born.

“In some cultures, the name-giving function is a jolly celebration with relatives and neighbours. The baby will be passed around to everyone when it is crying. Sometimes, popular movie actors or politicians are asked to name the babies also, in the middle of a crowd.

“Names are like Rama, Krishna, John, Tom. Sometimes people give their children funny names like Apple (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Romeo (Beckhams).

“Therefore, since a name is very important in social occasions, as well as business ones, my parents have indeed given me a name. At this point, I must mention that my father gave me the same name as his father. This is also a culture in some parts of the world. My father also has his father’s father’s name and my father’s brother has his mother’s father’s name.

“So, in our family, we have lot of people with same name. In our culture saying elder’s name is sin. So, we also have pet names like bangaru, chutti and baby. … ”

And on, and on, and on it will go senselessly for several pages. When you actually finish reading those pages, if you still weren’t brain-dead, it will occur to you that the flippin’ name that was asked, hasn’t been mentioned at all. No kidding!

It must be banned for such document-writing jobs to be allocated to people whose language skills clearly are limited to Basic, C++ and Java. Especially in large corporates where capable people are probably right in the next cubicle.

Obtusely related thought that is going on right now in my mind – so, there’s a recession. Small wonder why!

P.S. Don’t sell your shares in IT yet. I am glad to announce that after some loud noises were made about the quality (the lack thereof) of the document, aforementioned capable people have been put on the case, to turn things around.