Adventures in sub-contracting, Part 1

My sole post last October was an announcement that I had finally landed a job after nine months on the unemployment rolls. I appended a brief description of the strange and abbreviated "first day at the new job" – which, it turned out, was just the prelude to an entire week of more of the same, exaggerated by a couple of orders of magnitude, a sort of extended, week-long "first day" that, remarkably, lingered on even into the following week.

More about that in a later post, but first, let me explain the nature of my employment, which has been a bit of a new experience for me. (Identifying names have been omitted to keep the author from being deemed a potential security threat.) See, I've worked in industry (pulp & paper mill); I've worked in the academic world, both private and public (Cornell University is a peculiar amalgam of "endowed" colleges and a branch of the State University of New York, and I worked both sides of the divide over the years); I've worked in small businesses in the game and software industries. But I had never worked in anything remotely connected with the military and/or Federal government... until that fateful day last October.

Those readers familiar with Hampton Roads are well aware of the strong military presence here; while the Navy may be the most visible (at least Southside), several other branches have installations of one sort or another in the area. One consequence of this situation is that the area also has a strong military contractor presence. The employment landscape is, in fact, fairly littered with military contractors, sub-contractors, and sub-sub-contractors. This explains some of the difficulty I had finding new employment: while there's a fair number of jobs around here for technical and proposal writers, nearly all of them want someone with military-specific experience either in writing proposals according to arcane government standards, or in documenting such esoteric topics as, for example, boat maintenance or strategic weapons deployment. My technical writing experience, though fairly diverse, does not extend to such domains.

Fortunately, I stumbled onto a sub-contractor to a contractor to one of those "other branch of the military" installations with somewhat more mundane requirements: they needed a tech writer who could document accounting-related financial management software tools. And while my last job was nominally documenting "healthcare information management system" software – which on the face of it might not seem to bear much similarity to accounting software – it turns out that a major component of "healthcare information" is actually accounting information. That is, while the software is busy tracking patient information, bed assignments, diagnoses, treatments, medications, and test results, it's also just as busily tracking how much to bill the hapless patient (and/or his insurance) for all that stuff. So this job hasn't actually been too much of a stretch for me. Debits and credits are debits and credits, even if they do have a military flavor.

Coming soon in Hinterspace: A description of the rest of that first day week on my new job.