Yikes! Another dilemma....

Shall I call myself a budding author, struggling author, author in the closet or aimless author? Whichever it is, I'm so in a dilemma right now. This is related to writing as well as working.

As you all know, I have a paying permanent job. This job at times requires me to do some writing such as system documentation and reports.

So, there was a big dispute with one of the customers recently, and I know we've been played by some parties that don't want us to get more businesses there. I was directly involved in the project execution as the technical team leader. A few parties then claimed that we're incompetent (that claim actually directly translated as accusing ME for not being competent, right?)

I knew from day one of the problem that the customer was in a big mess; the project was not well co-ordinated, so many information missing in the initial system requirement, the previous contractor fucked-up big time (but I still don't know what actually went wrong) and many other not-so-good news I've heard about this particular customer from the IT community in this country.

After all these accusations and claims, I was instructed by my new boss to write a detailed report on what actually happened during the project execution. It was supposed to be a simple and straight forward technical report. Initially I thought it was going to be a breeze. Boy, I was wrong.

After spending half a day drafting the report, I found myself dying inside to elaborate the story. The temptation was beyond words for me to describe. I had problem to stick to the original sequence of events. I was suddenly thinking to make the stories in the report more interesting, inject some drama elements, maybe some fist fights, more verbal arguments, more involvement from the upper management and perhaps a voluptuous heroine who saved the day. Courtroom scenes also appeared in my head several times. LOL.

My situation then was like losing control to stick to my scope of work. That was dangerous, I could get myself fired! Then I stopped writing the report, went to have lunch with a few girls and just talked silly. I really needed to get so many things out of my system. At times, my creativity just couldn't be controlled. Then, after lunch, I went shopping to release more adrenaline. :)

When I got back to my workstation, things felt better. I was able to stick to the actual events that I had to put in the report. Self control was the hardest thing I had to master these days, especially when I knew I had to limit my creativity. Filtering what's flowing in the head is not as easy as sifting flour for baking.

It has taken me 2 days to complete this report. This is the hardest writing task I had to do in my entire life!! I hope I'll never be called to testify in court, my statement will surely change every 5 minutes.