I generally avoid labels. Words are the icebergs of reality, freezing us in limited conceptions of a far greater non-conceptual reality, and all that.
I recently bought three spinach and feta pies at a farm stall. However, I didn’t look at each one individually, and someone had slipped a steak and kidney pie into the spinach and feta drawer.
The ten-year old, who has a strong conception of himself as a vegetarian, took a bite of the offending pie, and his face contorted in horror, probably resembling the cow he was eating in its last moments.
Last time I spoke to him about it (yes, we’re still speaking), he recalled the experience by saying that he ‘almost wasn’t vegetarian any more’.
Same word, but his iceberg is a far cry from the restaurateur in Nieu-Bethesda, happily confirming that she served vegetarian food, and that her own son was vegetarian, before serving up a fish dish.
Recently, the iceberg applied to my work role has changed. For most of the time since I joined the MariaDB Foundation in 2013, the label assigned to me was “Principal technical writer: documentation”. Fairly dull, but reasonably descriptive of what took up a large part of my time. Of course, just like everyone must be ‘Chief’ this, ‘Senior’ that, I’d generously been given ‘Principal’, although for much of the time there was no-one else dedicated to documentation.
I’d happily do without a label, but I recognise one has to say something, and I wanted to highlight that I’m no longer involved in documentation. This time I was given the task of coming up with the label.
Goals were:
1) draw a line under server documentation
2) not too pretentious
3) generic enough to cover my current loose role, and cater for possible future changes
4) avoid hierarchy, overlaps with others
We eventually settled on ‘Digital Cartographer’. I imagine myself as an intrepid medieval explorer, navigating the rocky and rapidly changing digital landscape, while pencilling in kraken and dragons at the edges. Let’s hope I don’t meet the same fate as many of my predecessors, sailing off the edge.
I think it meets three out of the four criteria at least. And as an added bonus, LinkedIn is now utterly confused and I can safely bin all of its job suggestions.
Image is a portion of the Catalan Atlas, from Wikimedia Commons
