The students shuffled about.
"No, not really," said one, "There's all sorts of costs: licenses, software, subscriptions..."
"That's Apple for you!" chipped in the other.
"What about you, Matt? Is that something you're thinking of getting into?"
"Oh me?" I laughed, "Not likely. I did a programming course as part of my degree about fifteen years ago and I came out of it with a measly 36%."
"What degree did you do?"
"Physics."
"Physics?"
"Um, yes. Physics. Well don't look so surprised; it's not that unbelievable!"
"How did you end up doing documentation? What did you do after your degree?"
"Oh, well... I worked with lasers."
The students' eyes widened as they pictured me building my own lightsabre and firing beams of light at the moon.
"It's um, it's not as exciting as it sounds," I reassured them. I explained how I used to angle mirrors around the beam-chamber, how I used to crunch numbers between long and difficult beam-shots, and how that environment made me constantly rake over my inferiority-complex in a room full of competitively nasty scientists.
"In the end," I said, "I realised I enjoyed writing about the experiments a whole lot more than actually doing them."
"Still sounds cool though," said one.
No-one says that about technical documentation, do they?
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