Posts tagged "time"
Bandwidth
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | Filed under: Douchewords | 1 Comment
It’s a very, very bad idea to ask anyone working in a technical capacity whether they “have enough bandwidth” for something.
You see, while you’re standing there burbling on about how you desperately need a spreadsheet illustrating how many of your customers happen to be Ukranian Pig Farmers, your geeky co-worker isn’t listening because he’s gone into a panic.
He’s wondering how you rumbled him, trying quietly to shut down his Bittorrent client without you noticing, and wondering glumly just how long it’s going to take to download the rest of Star Trek: The Next Generation on his crappy home DSL line.
“Bandwidth”, you see, has a specific, technical meaning, and when you use it metaphorically to mean “time” (in place of a perfectly good word like, uh, “time”) it becomes difficult to know what you’re fucking talking about.
Oh, I know. It’s not your fault. This particular little nugget of inter-office hatefulness was first dug up by pasty nerds deep in the bowels of some server room; the ones who wish that humans were as logical as their beloved silicon devices, and secretly believe that “pinging” people, rather than saying “hello”, will magically Make It So. The kind of people who, in a bygone age, sniggered suggestively when their computer asked them to “insert disk in drive A:”. The kind of people who have, in fact, never “inserted disk” in anything more welcoming than their own right hand.
And perhaps you think that all “those computer people” are the same, and that “using the lingo” is endearing. Believe me, it’s not.
Quite aside from the confusion caused and the fake geeky bonhomie involved, the term “bandwidth” is insulting for a simpler reason. Like “Resource” and “Headcount” before it, it’s dehumanising.
When you inquire about my bandwidth I start wondering if you’re secretly planning to tattoo an asset barcode on my ass, track my level of depreciation and then write me off against your tax bill in 4 years when the shiny new hardware comes out of the local Community College.
Words are important - they shape our perceptions of the world. And when I’m being referred to in the same terms as a database server, I worry that I’ll be seen as being just as replaceable when my “processor” finally “crashes” due to a Bullshit Overload.
So, my bandwidth will be a bit scarce until I at least finish downloading all the episodes where Captain Picard gets trapped on the Holodeck. But as for my time, I have a bit of that available, yeah…
…if you ask me the right way.