Volition

Speaking of people's email being down...

Something that always annoys the anal-retentive in me is how non-geeks go about saying things like "the email is down" or "my internet is broken"^[0] and so on. Of course, a less jarring way of putting it might be to say "my email is down" or "my Internet connection is broken".

It has occured to me however that this sort of thing happens whenever someone who isn't knowledgeable in some jargon-laden area - usually something technical - has to talk to someone else about that area. Even worse, that I do it all the time.

I often complain, for example, that "my power was out" when I know full well that most of my neighbourhood, if not my state was experiencing a blackout as well. It was probably a transformer going boom or similar, so I should probably be complaining that my line (lead? feed?) from the power grid seems dead.

As to why this happens, clearly it is because lay people aren't familiar with the appropriate jargon or usage thereof, so can't even begin to use it properly. I wonder if there is also some humanising aspect that comes from decaring that when any shared resource or service is broken, that is it only broken for the affected user. Maybe. More likely it is just the Tragedy of the Commons, recast yet again.

In any case, I'm going to go just take a deep breath and try to relax next time someone tells me "my web is slow" when it is in fact their crappy operating system getting 0wned by some scr1pt kiddy or their crappy web browser getting b0rked by spyware... and just install Linux for them ^[1]. Well, I'll not complain about their mangling of my terminology, at least.

[0] - You really can hear people pronouncing Internet with a lower-case 'i'. Honest.
[1] - Pimp, pimp.