Workplace words & acronyms that really annoy you

In My Humble Opinion
1

This thread inspired me.

I work in the high-tech industry, and I reckon we have use more acronyms and buzzwords than any other. (I’m quite possibly wrong, but go with me here.)

I didn’t use a lot of them until I had quite a bit of time under my belt, because I felt like a newbie and didn’t want to come off as knowing it all too soon.

Here are a few. Feel free to contribute:

RC: Release Candidate. The software is done and is quite possibly the final version, though there might still be bugs to be fixed, which leads to another RC. :rolleyes:

RTM: Release to Manufacture. All of the bugs that can possibly be fixed have been, and we can release the software to be duped onto CD-ROM.

GM: Gold Master. This is the software CD that WILL be released with the product.

ETA: Estimated Time of Arrival. When you need to know when something will be ready for you to work on it.

Show-stopper: A bug that could potentially delay a software release.

TBD: The worst. “To be documented.” It means there’s a bug in our bugbase that we have to look into and document in our Release Notes, readme.txt file, and/or on our web site.

CheckDoc: Once we’ve documented a bug, we have to set it to CheckDoc so that the guys in QA can make sure we’ve documented the work-around properly, which brings me to…

Work-around: This means we’ve got a bug that we’re not going to fix, but here’s a band-aid solution. Have fun, loyal (?) customers!

I could think of more, but it’s Saturday, and I don’t want to think about work right now, thank-you-very-much.

All annoying terms, but ones I have to deal with every day. And you?

2

Oh, I forgot:

mobo = motherboard

:rolleyes:

3

ASAP. I hate it when people say this. It’s especially grating when they pronounce it as a word (“AY-sapp”) instead of pronouncing each letter.

Deliverable. A neologism referring to any particular piece of work that can be identified as a discrete chunk of work. That is, a product that can be identified as complete and ready for release at a certain time, instead of an ongoing service. I don’t know why I hate this one, other than the fact that I hate all neologisms.

Proactive. I sometimes wish Stephen R. Covey had never been born.

4

K.I.S.S.

I really hate hate HATE that one. Every time someone brings it up in a staff meeting or whatnot in whatever job or context I’ve been in, they always tell the group about it as if it is some profound statement that they thought up. No. Nonononono. Stop telling us about the freakin’ Keep It Simple Stupid method and get some good ideas on the table. Wipe that smug smile off your face, go back to retail 101 with the concept, and report back here when you have something new or valuable to add.

5

Pronouncing any set of letters as a word annoys me: The receptionist at work insists on calling an overnight U.P.S. delivery as an “Ups,” and she always gives this fake little chuckle after saying it – “Hey Twickster, you’ve got an `ups’ chuckle out here.”

Also, one typesetter (the one who draws little smiley faces inside looped letters) pronounces TOC (as in “Table of Contents”) as “tock,” instead of T-O-C, which is what everyone else says. If it’s intended to save time (i.e., those extra two nanoseconds it takes to say the other two letters), it doesn’t work, because every single freakin’ time she does it it confuses me, and I say “what?” and she has to say “Table of contents.” (Passive aggressive? Why do you ask?)

6

Marketroid-speak:
“We provide solutions!”
“Your best <whatever program> solution!”

The response I really want to give: “So what’s it dissolved in?”

7

I have to side with rjk on this one. Nothing’s more annoying than “Solution”

Especially when you go to a web site for tech support for an item, and you have to struggle through 7 layers of “solutions” that don’t at all sound like the item you have until you find it.

8

I agree with Arcite, proactive is the worst! When I was last in the workforce in the mid-1990’s, it was so overused and my boss would find a way to use it every other sentence.

9

Oh, I just thought of another one I feel is important to mention. This one’s both annoying and scary at the same time:

Resource as a synonym for “person.” Used as follows: “Our project is underresourced right now.” “We’re looking to bring in another resource.” “Let me know if you get too much on your plate; we’ll try to get an additional resource to help you out.” If you heard people talking like this, and you didn’t already know what they meant, it might take you quite a while to figure out that they were talking about human beings.

10

I’ll second (or third) proactive.

Also, the overuse of paradigm and misuse of parameter.

And I realize that I’m being anal-retentive here, but I’ve been very slow in adjusting to impact used as a verb, as in, “This will really impact how I do my job.” “Affect” and “influence” are perfectly good words that would serve nicely here. But I may just be a language curmudgeon.

11

bundle and realize.

Normally, I’d have nothing against these two words, except that for the past month I’ve been doing Japanese-to-English re-writing work for an electronics company’s upcoming sales conference, and the (Japanese) writer for the client insists on constantly using “bundled” in place of “with” and “realizes” in place of “does”. No matter how many times I change it and explain why I’m changing it, she not only keeps doing it, she takes out my corrections and replaces them with her gibberish.

12

We never use the word “problem”. Instead, the word is issue. We’re also big on solutions (for “issues”, of course). The word leverage also gets used a lot in my workplace.

13

God, how I hate the word “multitasking”! I wonder who the bastard was who not only created this word, but actually made a virtue of what was once just plain speedup or doing three people’s jobs!!

Then there is “associate”. Low paid retail sales people are now associates. Like an associate professor or not quite a partner in a professional practice. Geez.

I guess there are others that drive me up the wall, but don’t come to mind right off hand. Suffice to say, it is all designed to distort reality.

14

What’s especially annoying about proactive is that it’s misused most of the time. I mean, you can’t provide a proactive solution to a problem (oh, sorry, I mean issue) after the issue has already hit you over the head. No, that’d be reactive. Or maybe retroactive. But management thinks they’ll be proactive by stopping it now and keeping it from happening again.

Not long ago I had the chance to talk in an informal setting with a CEO of a medium-sized corporate company. I was astounded by how much lingo and “cute parables” he was willing to spout off. Finally, after he commented that “If you don’t have time to do it right, how will you have time to do it over?” in an effort to point out that we should get everything right the first time. I responded that “Good judgement comes from experience. And most experience comes from making bad judgements.” He gave me a grim look and avoided me the rest of the night. [sub]Guess I shouldn’t apply for the title of “Yes man” anytime soon.[/sub]

15

When I worked for a cell phone company in “Customer Care” :rolleyes: we were told never to refer to the customer’s phone as such. It was always a “handset” or “device.” Want to know how many customers used the terms “handset” or “device”? Zero.

16

:smiley:

http://www.betterworkplacenow.com/bingo/

17

Do you hate the terms themselves, or the fact that there are so many of them?

I don’t know who’s got the most, but my industry has a boatload. Particularly bad are the morning reports from the rigs. They are usually written almost entirely in acronyms, with a scattering of numbers and the odd plain-english phrase. I get 15-20 pages of that stuff on most days, sometimes more. I’ve been in this business well over twenty years and I still run into ones I don’t know. Some examples:

POOH - pull out of hole
MIRU - move in rig up
NUBOP - nipple-up blow-out preventers
BHA - bottom hole assembly
WOO - waiting on orders
WOW - waiting on weather (always makes me think of Wendy O. Williams)
WOCT - waiting on completion tools
SQZ - squeeze
RIH - reaming in hole
FIH - fish in hole
CBU - circulate bottoms up
ROP - rate of penetration

Anon. There are literally hundreds, or more likely, thousands of these.

That’s just the drilling side; exploration has a bunch as well. It’s not all bad, afterall, I’d rather say AVO than “amplitude variation with offset” every time I refer to the phenomenon. But bad things can happen to good acronyms. Like identity theft; I once sat through a presentation where my then boss used DMO (Dip Move-Out; a then new black box) when he meant AVO (also a then new black box). Although unrelated, they had buzzword status at the time, and nobody in the audience appeared to catch it.

Another thing that happens is the transformation of an acronym into a verb. AVO is a phenomenon that can be identified through certain data processing regime. But it’s not uncommon to hear someone say, “We AVO’d this acreage.”

PSM is often used to denote pre-stack migration. The alternative is post-stack migration. Anybody see a problem with that acronym? Suffice to say there are many, many more.

And there is the jargon. If a well is wet, it’s dry, or a duster. Railroad tracks describe an electric log through a thick shale section with no appreciable curve excursions. To swab 1) a well means to pull fluid out of the hole with the drill string or a wireline cup, 2) data means to acquire it by, uh, extranormal means and 3) a person means to engage that person in conversation and get him to, willingly or not, reveal confidential information. To spud a well means to begin turning to the right, which means you are actually making hole.

A pipe test is one that requires casing to get down, and is thus expensive to evaluate. Christmas trees are the collection of pipes and valves on a producing wellhead that control the flow and prevent a blow-out. The rathole can be a shallow hole on the drilling floor where soon to be used drill pipe is kept or it can be the extra 100 or so feet of hole you drill once you’ve reached a logging point, so you can get a good log.

Jugs can be the chambers on a wireline formation tester, or they can be geophones, which are tended to by jug hustlers (or juggies). Juggies are a subset of doodlebuggers, who are the people that work on seismic acquisition crews.

Probably everyone knows what a wildcat is, and can imagine what a development well is, but what about a PUD? A PUD is a glorious thing to have. PUD stands for proven, undeveloped and it is used when you claim that you have proven a reservoir to be productive and then claim the value of your estimate of the reserves as part of your net worth. Once a property’s been PUDed (there’s that verb thing again), it may well never be drilled, lest you find out that it was not quite as proven as surmised.

So, anybody still here? Obviously, I can’t scratch the surface. I googled up an oil and gas jargon listing and it ~5000 entries and misses a lot of what I’ve got here.

Oddly enough, I hear very little of the substanceless newspeak decried by rjk and others above.

18

Another one that we use in our troubleshooting chapters and Release Notes:

"(application) may become unstable.".

Hell, we know it’s going to crash if you do whatever it is we’re telling them not to do. But we can’t say “Look, it’s gonna crash, OK, so don’t do this, shitwit!” So it’s "…may become unstable."

Whatever. :rolleyes:

19

I just heard a new one five minutes ago from a new client.

Meganational

Apparently, ‘global’ and ‘international’ just aren’t impressive-sounding enough for this halfwits.

Why, oh why, do people who can barely speak a language insist on correcting native speakers?

20

Oh, here’s one I came across the other day on a business card.
Apparently “human resources manager” isn’t snazzy enough. Now one company has “human capital manager,” as if the former wasn’t already depersonalized enough.