Technical Stuff Is Boring

I have a few friends who like to talk nothing but technical stuff when we meet. As an IT professional with more than a few years' experience, I can usually hold my own in these conversations.

The sad thing is is that some of these folks are fairly new to the field and are very excited about the new little things they have just learned or the earth-shattering problem they are having with a project they are on. Imagine if I were to bring this conversation to you:

"I am building a systems monitoring environment. I found Nagios to be on one hand too flexible and thus a pain to configure and too inflexible and incapable of monitoring things in the manner they need to be monitored on the other. As a result, I have dusted off my old AlertCentral I started around the time of my Computer Sciences Corporation days. That one was originally mostly written in KSH, but the next version was mostly in PERL. The first two versions stored alerts in flat files. The flat files made aging and escallations very difficult. As such, I am writing AC III almost entirely in PERL. All alerts are stored in MySQL. The WEB interface for configuration and alert handling is written in PHP with some Java. The really tricky part is notification. Everyone does pager (text or number) and e-mail. I am doing my notifications in VOICE. The voice module is written in Voxeo's callxml and PHP. calxml does the text-to-speech (TTS) for me. It even does the "Press or say 'one' to repeat" part. The voice module interacts with MySQL to enqueue and track call progress. The PERL modules on the monitoring server can interact with that MySQL database so it knows what to do next."

That sort of conversation is usually done in one breath. After the first five words, even the most technical audience has pegged his empathy guage and is thinking of how to break away for another beer and someone who will be quiet long enough to listen to his own long-winded boring story.

These long prattlings erode friendships and make listeners' lives difficult. To illustrate this point, there is a guy who rides the bus with me. He always want to talk about technical problems at work with me. (He found out I know the difference between a bit and a byte.) His speech is usually a complaint about how stupid someone he works with is and how he is going to implement a particular technical solution to fix that person's mistakes. The language is always sprinkled with random four-letter words that rhyme with "Pumpkin."

If he worked with me, he would be eroding what I like to call "colleague equity." "Colleague equity" is that bit of "gung ho" spirit you work up with someone by A) not being in their face all the time, and B) carrying more than just your bit of the load.

A shop in which the employees have built up a lot of colleague equity with each other, especially with management, has high "psychic income." "Psychic income" is the enticement an employee feels to continue working for an employer, even if the pay and benefits are poor.

Oh, a technical term: casters-up. This is the status a piece of equipment enters when it ceases to function properly, or "died." This is comparable to road kill that might have its legs (or casters) pointing up in the air. Usage: the system has gone casters-up.

Help desk people are accustomed to working with callers who have a faulty "chair to keyboard interface." You can probably figure that one out.

Data files that have been lost or deleted have gone into the "bit bucket."

There are more of these really exciting terms. They will come along later... hopefully in context.