Hi I’m John, I work in Quality Assurance

 I recently posted something about unpleasant careers, which reminds me that for the past decade or so, even reaching back into the time before IPhones, I’ve worked in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, in Quality Assurance. Why Quality Assurance? Why Pharmaceuticals? Entirely by accident, of course. I was working temporary jobs, which I rather enjoyed actually, and had an assignment to go work at a pharmaceutical plant, and eventually got a permanent job there. It could easily have gone the other way, if I hadn’t gotten that particular job I would probably have moved to other assignments and maybe stumbled into some other career, and I’m betting that if I hadn’t gotten a push from a Manager there who happened to view me with second hand approval (I was a friend of their star employee), the position would have gone to someone else more deserving. But here I am, working in a heavily-regulated, science based industry where management prefers humanities degrees with a minimum of two years Creative Writing experience. Haha! Gotcha! They’re actually pretty easy-going about the creative writing experience.
And yes, I do some writing for this job, mostly emails of one sentence or less - and they are spell-binding, I assure you! I mock myself, but I would love to teach a college course in emails, procedures, and investigations; the only reading and writing I’ve done in pharmaceuticals, and they probably comprise over 90% of the professional reading and writing performed by English majors in the pharmaceutical industry and possibly anywhere. Humanities Professors would probably prefer to completely ignore the existence of this kind of English, but I can’t think of a better way to gain appreciation for “literature” as we call it, the English designed to tell a story, than to study it alongside the everyday English, the English that organization people use to avoid telling any story at all. I would call it “camouflage writing”. It’s actually a lesser form of fiction, meant to bore and repel rather than enchant and distract. You may write it to hide your lack of knowledge on a subject, or to avoid telling people all you know about the subject to safeguard your job, or like the greater part of working people you may have never really learned to write except in the organization where everyone writes in camouflage and you don’t actually know how to write in any other way.
And of course, in a regulated industry, the regulating authority will read your procedures and your investigations. Maybe they will read them in front of your managers. Maybe their eyes will glaze, and they will stifle a yawn, and the managers will sign you a thumbs up, and offer them a blanket and a pillow.
People ask me; “What is Quality Assurance? What do you do exactly?” And I answer...
Gotcha again! Nobody has ever asked, literally ever, in all the years I’ve told people that I work in Quality Assurance. Not only have they not asked what it is, they usually stop asking me anything, as if my answer was so awful, so surprising in a very bad way, that they don’t dare ask anything more, as I might construe the slightest hint of interest on their part as a signal to vomit forth every nasty dribble of information on quality assurance that I’ve been holding in all these years and they so do not want to hear about it that they are conversationally frozen with fear.
I completely understand, of course. The name “quality assurance” was devised by the same people who devised standard operating procedures and please believe me when I say that they are not interested in being interesting. See notes on camouflage writing above.