WorkSpeak

“It’s gonna be a day tomorrow,” says trader #1 in the elevator yesterday morning.

“Why?” says trader #2. “Is it a number?”

Four months ago I would’ve had no clue what those two guys were talking about.

And amidst all the unbelievable bullshit I’ve dealt with in this new job, learning a new language has definitely been the bright spot.

Every business has WorkSpeak – a special language used by employees comprised of buzzwords, jargon, and cryptic phrases built from years of doing the same thing over and over and over again.

I love it.

People figuring out better and easier ways to communicate with each other to get things done.

Cool.
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“6 and 12 down, 6 cheese please!” yells the Crew Chief from up front between the warming bin and the registers.

“6 and 12, 6 cheese!” the Grill person replies.

6 Big Macs. 12 hamburgers. Make 6 of them with cheese.

That was the first language I learned at the first job I ever worked.

At McDonald’s.

Six Big Macs actually meant 12 patties so you had to do a tinybit of thinking to add up the total frozen solid burgers to smack down on the grill.

“Four quarters, two cheese!”

That was four Quarter Pounders, two with cheese.

Quarter Pounders (obviously) used different patties from the burgers so they had to be called out separately.

With those fancy schmancy computer screens relaying orders to the kitchen now, I'm guessing the language of McDonald's is dead. Sad.
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Trader #1: It’s gonna be a day tomorrow.
Translation: It will be an extremely busy day on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade tomorrow.

Trader #2: Why, is it a number?
Translation: Will there be an economic announcement that could affect the markets like unemployment or interest rates or housing starts or retail stats?
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The information technology business is without question the worst when it comes to WorkSpeak.

Every year or two the geeks get together and develop a whole new language so they can charge clients more per hour explaining it to them.

First it was client/server. Then it was middleware. Then it was e-Business or E-Business or eBusiness, depending on if you worked for IBM or Microsoft or Oracle. Then it was business intelligence – an oxymoron if ever one existed – and data warehousing, which sounds vaguely cool but is poke-your-eyes-out-with-a-pencil boring. Then it was portals and dashboards and who knows what the fuck they’ve invented in the four months since I left that infernal industry.

You wanna know the first really nice thing my future husband ever did for me? Back in 1990, he created a cheat sheet of acronyms to make it easier for me to update resumes for the IT consulting firm where we met.

He helped me understand the language of our industry. And if that ain't romantic, I don't know what the hell is.
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So. Tell us about the language where you work. Tell us about the first day you heard it. Tell us how it’s changed over the years.

And put it on a rail.
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I am listening to: Gromit snoring
I am reading: Neil at the Sun-Times
And I am: Sleepy