The new job works out pretty well

Since 3 weeks now I am working for Dynamic Controls and I have to say: I like it a lot. Great team, great job. Even two other Dutchies work for the company :-) Which is not so surprising, actually. People told me that in Christchurch 14% of the population is Dutch or of Dutch descent (in the rest of NZ that percentage is 7%).

As a technical writer I have to write technical manuals. I am the technical writer of the company, so they have given me a lot of freedom to manage things the way I want. They do trust me with a lot of responsibility that way, which is very nice.

When they hired me they were afraid at first that my English would not be good enough to write English manuals, but since then it has become clear that their manuals the way they are now contain far too complicated English to be well understood by people who do not speak English as their native language (which is 90% of their European market). To solve this, they will probably switch over to Simplified English, an international aviation language standard that has to ensure that the aviation manuals are not misunderstood globally.

Misunderstandings of technical manuals can have serious consequences. In a nuclear power plant in China a sign read “turn handle 1½ times”. The engineer thought he had to turn the handle one half times: 0.5 instead of 1.5. The result was a lot of damage to the power plant. So who’s to blame? A bad reader or a bad writer? Introducing the simple language standard will be left completely up to me, so that is quite a nice challenge to be working on.

Dynamic Controls is situated on the exact opposite side of Christchurch of where we live at the moment. Not particularly handy. However, Emma’s workplace is just down the street from mine! Every day we can drive to work together. The only drawback to that is, that if one of us is allowed to leave work early (especially Emma gets that a lot) it will be a waiting game until the other one finishes too. Oh well, we don’t have to buy a second car this way. And driving together is enjoyable as well.