ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
(OP)
Corny management sayings i can live with on the GIGO prindipal and that i can instantly forget what management say.
I started in a papaer office with Grundig dictaphone, a typing pool and fiel clerks to hide all the paper records where no one else could find them.
Then came computers with their promise of lower head counts and a paperless office.... wrong on both counts as it happens, but what they did bring was the IT department.
IT are a frustration. If my computer crashes, I need them to fix it. This is never a happy experience because I usually discover I have about the lowest priority in the company and they are always busy doing something else... though what I have never discovered.
Worse though is that they have a language more obscure than legalese and they employ it to devastating effect.
Some of their sayings are vaguely comprehensible but much of what they say is, deliberately think, way over my head.
[ul]The server's down (again)
[ul]You've exceeded your server capacity (I'm working too hard, but that's not what they mean to say)
Those are the excuses I think I understand.
What I never understood was why upper management get the exensive powerful laptops to carry home and back to play Hearts and Minesweeper (not loaded on mere mortal's machines in our company) while the rest of us had to make do with old 386 machines running Windows 3.1 to run complex spreadsheet applications, prepare devastating powerpoint presentations and write endless reports no one ever read. .... IT's excuse:
"We won't upgrade to the latest Windows until all the bugs are out" (never, in other words, I never ever had a current Windows operating system or Office setup).
I started in a papaer office with Grundig dictaphone, a typing pool and fiel clerks to hide all the paper records where no one else could find them.
Then came computers with their promise of lower head counts and a paperless office.... wrong on both counts as it happens, but what they did bring was the IT department.
IT are a frustration. If my computer crashes, I need them to fix it. This is never a happy experience because I usually discover I have about the lowest priority in the company and they are always busy doing something else... though what I have never discovered.
Worse though is that they have a language more obscure than legalese and they employ it to devastating effect.
Some of their sayings are vaguely comprehensible but much of what they say is, deliberately think, way over my head.
[ul]
[ul]
Those are the excuses I think I understand.
What I never understood was why upper management get the exensive powerful laptops to carry home and back to play Hearts and Minesweeper (not loaded on mere mortal's machines in our company) while the rest of us had to make do with old 386 machines running Windows 3.1 to run complex spreadsheet applications, prepare devastating powerpoint presentations and write endless reports no one ever read. .... IT's excuse:
"We won't upgrade to the latest Windows until all the bugs are out" (never, in other words, I never ever had a current Windows operating system or Office setup).





RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
jmw,
I'll trade you your 386 for my Commador 64.
"If you are going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance!"
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
Boy, if that gives my age away, then how about this: I even remember the first computer I ever saw was an Elliot 803, donated to our college by ICI, I think. Its great advantages being no IT and no Bill Blue Screen Gates and an awefull lot of punched dots from the tape to throw at other people in the Styudent Union Bar(till the safety minded tutors warned us they could get behind someones eyeball and sever an optic nerve.... spoilsports).
Pencil and paper to Punched tape to Windows.... not quite such a time frame as bronze age to iron age but it sometimes feels like it.
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
Cheers
Greg Locock
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
My first computer was a Polymorphic "Poly 88"
It was an S-100 based machine. I used an old TV set for a Monitor.
In the 286 days I remember loading a program off of 48 3 1/2" floppies.
yours
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
On of our big problems is IT want to upgrade our oldest department laptop which currently has three boot options: NT4, Win 95, and DOS 6.22 / Win 3.11. We need the older O/S to communicate with some of the equipment at the plant, much of which is late 80's vintage. The proposed new laptop doesn't have a serial port, and the DOS emulators within slater windows versions are a waste of time, as are the USB - serial converters.
If anyone can ever explain why Lotus Notes has to exist, please let me know. I really can't get along with this software, it just frustrates me.
When reminiscing about old computers, does anyone remember the BBC Model 'B'? What a lovely machine to program, and really well built. It never got the games support of the C64 (nightmare to program) or the Sinclair Spectrum (glorified calculator), and was relatively expensive. I think mine is still in the loft of the house.
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I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy it...
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
Cyril Guichard
Mechanical Engineer Consultant
France
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
"The sweat of an IT man" is similar to "hen's teeth" in our world.
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
Normally in working with colleagues from other areas/departments there's a healthy give & take situation - flow of help in both directions. I like helping you because I know you'll help me if I ask. With IT it's different. The only help I can give them is telling them how to do their job properly when they screw up. It doesn't buy that many favours.
This is why IT hold so much power in companies. They have no favours to return.
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
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I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy it...
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
service quality = 100% / number of IT people
In my current company the number of IT people is 1. I am a happy person. My computer is only 2 years old, it is fast, clean and if I want to change regedit setting, I can just go ahead and mess around. If I screw things up, the IT guy will tell I'm stupid and then happily do a complete reinstall.
In my previous company the number of IT people is estimated at 1500. The calculation of the quality of service provided is left as an exercise to the reader. My computer was 7 years old, windows crashed at least 3 times a day, to have this repaired I had to call the helpdesk which was located abroad (it used to be the UK at the time but I guess they must certainly have moved to India in the meantime). The only thing the helpdesk did was give me a request number and a priority which was always low, unless (I discovered) when there was a safety issue related to it, that makes the priority jump to the highest level. I remember once the printer was set to the wrong paper size. After printing a safety critical procedure, I found out that the last two lines of each page had not been printed, so I played the safety card. Within an hour, somebody from an external IT company was called to the site urgently and fixed it.
Sorry for being so off-topic but I know it's everybody's favorite subject...
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
May be its that when my mechanical and electrical engg friends switched dover to IT some ten years ago, I didn't.
I am glad.
Dinesh
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
Ah your kid brother is object oriented!
OOP is such a beautiful jargon (Smalltalk - indeed!). When I first heard the verb "reify", I thought I had not heard the middle part of the word.
There are many verbs like "re-###" ("### once again") and many verbs like "###-ify" ("make ###").
"Reify" sounds like an empty shell with no proper meaning. No idea how the verb was invented.
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
Jargon is jargon. They are in every discipline.
And goof balls are goof balles. They are in every department. See this thread:
Jerkholes at the office
thread731-151135
Maybe you need to be nicer to your IT guys - like try saying hi and thank you?
I usually get along with IT guys/gals, and I've worked at HWL/Allied, IBM down to a 10 person consultant company where I am my IT guy.
"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
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RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
Opening a dictionary (or typing the word into an online dictionary) could provide that idea.
It's not an IT neologism. It dates back to the mid-19th century. Re is not always a prefix. In this case it's related to res as in in medias res (oh, those IT dudes and their Latin...), and means "thing". Reify means to take something abstract and make it concrete.
Hg
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RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
Pretty funny, I agree with epoisses otherwise, personal accountability is the way to go.
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
The lesson I learned is that you want to run the system administrator's favorite software.
I ran AutoCAD and PordWerfect a lot. Every once in a while, I launched Lotus123. I needed AutoCAD and PordWerfect to get my job done, so I learned how to seriously abuse them. Most problems people brought to me were things I had already done, so it was simple to provide help. I had a limited interest and understanding of Lotus123, so I was not good at troubleshooting. Lotus123 for UNIX was crap, and I never got it working well.
JHG
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
RJC
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
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I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy it...
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
RE: ITese.... a new and incomprehensible language
When you work in consulting become really good friends with the IT guys and the HR director!