Things That Might Be Offensive If You Aren’t in IT…

My team and I were sitting around talking one day and we stumbled upon the topic of IT gargon. Now for those of us who are a part of the IT industry these might seem like common, everyday phrases. But we started to think what HR employees, policemen, even doctors might think if they heard us talking like this.

For example, my team has been asked on numerous occassions to produce “daily dumps.” To the IT person this is referring to data. But imagine you are a doctor. And you hear that someone is forced to produce daily dumps for another department. You see where I am going with this?

Now imagine that you are asked to provide ”daily dumps” while someone else is checking the size and frequency of your logs.  Again, if you are a doctor, this would be a very politically incorrect way to phrase this request.  It gets even worse if someone offers up a SCSI (pronounced scuzzy) adapter. And people think IT personnel are geeks (snort * snort).

Now if you are a policeman and you overhear my team talking about “killing Maximo”, is it in no way, shape, or form, a reference to a murder. We are simply rebooting a server. Likewise, if you hear us discussing “dropping a session,” this is in no way a code for gang activity. We are removing excess users from the database.

These are things that HR might find offensive. For instance, I am a female manager and I ask one of my male employees to go “harden the box.” I could understand how HR might take that out of context. However, it simply refers to applying the necessary security scripts to a server to comply with security guidelines. I might also ask an employee about his “bang account.” I am not asking this employee for a sexual history, it is simply referring to whether or not he has admin access to the server. But you can see why a simple term might land an IT tech in the HR office.

Anyway, as my team and I come up with more lingo I will make sure I add it to this blog. I must now go apply more tape to my bottle glasses and clean my pocket protector before tomorrow.