Angela Maslin: Creating Order Out of Disorder

July 2015

Angela Maslin - a Technical Writer at Contact Energy - recently teamed up with Lorraine Bonisch to talk to the Christchurch Branch about a couple of interesting projects they had worked on together.Claire Nicholson took the opportunity to interview Angela and find out more about her job and her path into technical communication.

How did you get into technical communication?

I did a psychology degree, then moved to Christchurch. I started doing my NZCE and got a holiday job in an electronics factory. They made me a tester and I used to wave the test instructions in front of the Engineers, and say ‘What do you call this, what a load of rubbish’ and they asked me if I wanted to become a Technical Writer. They were growing at the time and going for ISO accreditation so they needed all their work instructions written up. That was fun. I was the only technical writer there.

From there I moved to Tait Communication where I worked for a small engineering group that customised Tait products. I got to do a real variety of things while I worked there. For example, all the fire trucks in NZ have still got the membrane keypad that I did the artwork for. It’s over-size, so that firefighters can use the buttons with big, fat gloves on. I worked at Tait for 17 years in the end.

What do you love most about being a Technical Writer?

I really like the variety and the stimulation of always learning new things. I like dealing with a wide variety of people. As a tech writer you need to be able to collaborate with everyone. I’m not an Engineer, but I like to know what an Engineer does.

Sometimes it seems like everything I touch explodes into a million pieces and becomes infinitely complicated, but I think that’s one of the things that tech writers like. We like making order from disorder, and we have the orderly mind to do it. My partner is a programmer and I say to him sometimes that I feel like our jobs have so much in common. As a tech writer I’m running algorithms all the time, just to filter and order things and figure out who to talk to and how to get to the bottom of things.

Tell us about your new job at Contact Energy

I’m the LPC [Liquid Petroleum Gas] HSE [Health Safety and Environment] Technical Writer in Christchurch. It’s really cool, I now know lots about LPG.

What kind of things have you learned so far?

I’ve learned that all our LPG comes from Kupe gas field of Taranaki. It’s a by-product from the harvest of natural gas, and contains butane and propane. There are different mixes depending on what it’s being used for. The LPG for the South Island is all shipped to Lyttelton and then it’s put into massive bulk tanks that sit under mounds of stones. Five 100 tonne tanks feed the reticulated gas in Christchurch.

I’ve also learnt quite a bit about HSE which is a massive deal for Contact Energy. They’ve got quite a few hydro stations, as well as geothermal generation, so they need to have high standards in this area.

Once a week I visit the branch next door and have been out on the LPG delivery trucks to learn more about how LPG is delivered and what it’s used for. Who knew that so many forklifts are run off small LPG cylinders on the back of them?! I also get to visit Wellington once a month and work in the most gorgeous corporate building.

What are you working on at the moment?

Contact Energy has 8 branches and 29 franchises. I’m using one franchise branch as a template to create an HSE and Operations manual for Contact Energy sites. The first section explains who Contact Energy are, what the site is and its facilities. It then gets into how we plan for hazard and risk management, how we implement it and how we check that it’s happening properly – auditing and reporting etc. It’s fun. There are a lot of different people involved and a review team of 10.

I’m also restructuring all the LPG information on the intranet. At the moment under LPG there are approximately 17,000 files and 80 web pages that people avoid using! My first task was to carry out a content audit of what we have and what’s being used. My next step will be to visit the IT team in Wellington and work with them to develop a system for handling the content we want to keep and update.

What is the one piece of advice that you could give someone who is thinking about becoming a Technical Communicator?

If you’re someone who thinks along the lines of ‘that’s not part of my job, so I won’t do it’ then it’s not the path for you. Knowing something about everything is part of your job and pitching in helps. Someone might ask you to help with something that’s a bit trivial (like reformatting a Word document) or not technically part of your role, but the benefit is building a relationship with them. The relationship side of our jobs is so important. Everything we need to accomplish hinges on relationships. We need people to trust us so that then they’ll be happy to reveal their knowledge to us.

If you’re working on an interesting project, we’d love to interview you. Let us know at comms@techcomm.nz.