It’s no secret that I spent the better part of my career as a senior technical writer. “Information Architect,” if you prefer late 1990s euphemisms, but I prefer things that emphasize the “writing” part of the job. I didn’t so much build data as untangle it and make sense of it. It’s also no secret that I like to play with SEO. And I do mean “play” – I’ve not made a serious study of it, nor read the blog posts of others who’ve made a serious study of it, and I have in fact turned off readers here by even joking about it openly (mea culpa, I apologize for the “meta blogging,” but you know I’m weirdly competitive and I do love a silly challenge). I like to think that my own writing is as scattered and niche-less as my search engine queries. But that’s not what you want, is it?

No – to be precise, it’s what one family member, eleven friends and six random spammers who’ve kindly bothered to subscribe to this blog tolerate, while the rest of the visits come through direct links or “organic search” to older incarnations of this blog by way of the following queries:

Technical Writer Till the Day I Die

I’ll admit it – after I bought my new Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, I had to search my own site for “can’t answer incoming calls android.” It’s a useful post buried in one of my older blogs, but not entirely accurate for newer versions of Android, because you can no longer dismiss the annoying Accessibility menu after setting Single tap to swipe. But what you can do is move the damned thing – make it an “Edge icon” – and get it out of your way.

How to Answer Calls on Android with Just a Tap (or, Google, if I’d wanted a @#$%ing iPhone, I’d have bought a @#$%ing iPhone!)

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Interaction and dexterity.

Toggle on the Assistant menu.

Toggle on Single tap to swipe.

To get the floating menu out of your way, you can no longer drop it onto a big red X on the home screen and make it disappear. You must turn it on and leave it lurking there. But you can make it unobtrusive and harder to open accidentally. Toggle on Show as edge icon and that will move it off to the curved side of the screen. You can reposition it by dragging it right or left and up and down. I now have it on the upper right corner – a portion of the screen I rarely have to touch, so it doesn’t pop open while I’m trying to do other things.  You could make it invisible, but then you couldn’t see where it’s lurking, and that’s kind of creepy.

You can also set the physical Volume up or Side key to answer calls. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Interaction and dexterity > Answering and ending calls.

Don’t ask me why you can’t customize this to use the Volume down key, three finger-taps and a nose bang, or a Judge-Judy eye-roll (the device has biometric options, right?).

Be sure to test it – have a friend phone you to make sure you’ve got your settings working the way you want them to work.

Now, Back to the Blog…

It’s depressing. Is this all I am to you – a technical writer who can tell you, when Samsung won’t, how to answer a phone? Why not read some fiction:

• Red Paint
• Dessert for Breakfast
• Bullfrog and Bullfeathers
• Antipatheia
• Meet Me Halfway
• A Fairy Tale for Writers: What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
• A Fairy Tale for Writers: Flight of the Bumbling Writer
• A Fairy Tale for Writers: Maybe Nana Doesn’t Need to Know
• So Tolls the Bell on 2020

Or poetry:

• Shadowbird
• Two Armadillos’ Strife