My office, like a lot of offices these days, has a high number of OffShore consultants and employees from India and Mexico. Over the years, I seem to have become the go-to girl to explain weird things (like what the dispenser in the ladies room is for) and weird turns of phrases.
This started when someone asked me what ‘Boom goes the dynamite’ meant, and I had to explain it was a catchphrase someone used to indicate what happens when everything goes wrong, and the dynamite in your hand blows up. They found that funny and since then, I’ve got a little following. Which amuses me.
Sometimes I have to explain things like why you can’t pronounce all acronyms like words. For some reason we have a ton of Three-Letter Acronym program names (aka TLAs). Pretty much everything is truncated to three letters. For example, we have a program called TOW which we call ‘tow.’ We have another call TOA that we call ‘tay’. FEE is fee and so on and so forth. Most of the time this is pretty safe. The Brits at my office laugh when we talk about DFR (called duffer) and we actually had to rename FAG because someone got mad about it. I wasn’t too surprised when they named the other programs. The problem we had was when they added a U to CNT. I had to explain why that was bad.
They’ve got some pretty awesome turns of phrases, though, many of which I’ve adopted because they just rock.
“Please do the needful.” — Any time you submit a request for a process, they tack this on. I love it. It’s polite and direct.
“Shooting my feet myself!” — He meant shooting myself in the foot, which amusingly turned out to be a phrase another coworker had never understood until about a day later, when he coded something, forgot about it, and freaked out when he tried to do something the old way.
“I am sitting here, shitting myself blind.” — This happened after I was explaining what ‘shit or go blind’ meant (someone heard it on TV). The problem, I think, was that earlier I’d explained why the phrase ‘I am sitting here beside myself!’ was funny but wasn’t quite the same as ‘beside myself with laughter’. Somehow we got a bit jumbled. The fellow who said this was mortified at first, but I told him it was so awesome, everyone would know what he meant, and he rocked.
One of the things we never do, by the way, is make them use fake names. If their name is Sundararaman, then we call him Sundararaman unless he asks us to call him by his nickname Sundar (he said ‘like Thundarr the Barbarian!’), in which case we oblige. After all, these guys are being expected to say our names, we should make the effort to use their names!
The guys from Mexico have it a little easier. I know enough Spanglish to remember their local idioms pretty quickly. And now that I’m learning French, my multitude of French friends are helping me understand things. Like “Je parle français comme une vache espagnole.”
I speak French like a Spanish cow.
And yeah, I kind of do right now.
Moo.