When I knew I was going to lose my job at IBM I was talking with Jim Getzinger about it and he asked if I could come to his company and help him with a very sticky problem. It seemed that he had a User Guide for his product that was totally inaccurate. The product was a virtual store that you could make part of your website. You could change the look of the store to fit your website as if you had written the code for the store. It was a great product. Today, most websites have this capability, but back then Miva had one of the first that became available.  But the on-line manual that told you how to use the Miva product was totally incorrect in its instructions and this was causing problems.

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It turned out that the technical writer who created the manual was really an accountant. He had been asked by his previous company to document an accounting website and he had done it. That was his total experience in technical writing. To be fair to Jim he had inherited this man when he took the VP of Marketing job.

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As I looked through the manual and talked with the main programmer about how the program worked it became obvious to me that this tech writer could never create a manual that told the user how to use a product. He simply didn't understand the program or the Internet.

I had a talk with Jim and he said he would have to let the tech writer go and asked me if I would like the job. In fact he said there were some other things that I could do and offered me the job of Director of Technical Communications. I accepted.

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There were good things about the job and bad things. The main bad thing was the commute. I lived in San Marcos and the office was just south of the 52 Freeway in San Diego. Again I had a 30-mile commute on the freeway. But I had a job that I liked very much.

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I decided that I would write a group of "how to" doc that would be on the Miva website. I produced a 120+ document library for the Miva e-commerce products. These documents were produced in Adobe .pdf format and in HTML. I created these documents from scratch. I used the Miva tool to create stores and I interviewed the engineers to get the information I needed.

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The company had offices on two floors of the building.  Most of the marketing people were on the second floor but my office was on the first. One day I went up to the second floor during lunch time and there was no one in the department. I was kind of ticked off to think that they all went out to eat together and didn't invite me. It was after lunch that I found out why they had not invited me. They had all been laid off. I was called into the president's office and was told that I too was being laid off. So that was the end of another great job. I had been laid off from the last four companies that I worked for. And there was more to come.

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