Outing and outage
After my trip out last week, I felt that nothing and no one could harm me. My gamble on the hokey pokey ice-cream paid off and taught me a valuable lesson: all this time I’ve been worrying about understanding the words, and the truth is, I probably don’t need to.
The more I thought about this, the more sense it made. The B2B copy I edit is so dull that it’s unlikely anyone actually reads it. Let’s face it, B2B websites and publications serve their authors, not their ‘readers’. They’re there to make companies and organisations feel better about themselves, to help them fool themselves that they are actually interesting.
The only people who do read this guff are the authors and the poor old editorial staff who have to trawl through it. The ‘readers’ just flick through it and pretend that they’ve read it when they’re at meetings.
This was my new attitude to not understanding the words. I decided to stop letting things worry me so much and was greatly encouraged when I heard that this is a “breakthrough” and I am making “considerable progress”.
So imagine my dismay then, when my working life was suddenly disrupted by something called “outage” in the middle of last week. I couldn’t get any emails, which in some ways can be a good thing but in my case was not. People kept phoning me to ask why I hadn’t responded to their email. It got to a point where I had to phone an IT person to find out what was wrong and they talked to me about the outage. I passed on the message, telling my numerous callers:
“I’m suffering from ICT outage. We are working to resolve this issue.”
Naturally I hoped they would accept that and hang up, but they didn’t. They asked me what it was supposed to mean. The irony, I thought, that they whose words I do not understand should ask me what I mean!
I had to get back to my clients with some explanation, and fast. I googled ‘outage’ and trawled through the results. It was hopeless. Google offers so many variants of ‘outage’, but the obvious one to go for was ‘outage definition’. And then disaster, confusion as my eyes scanned the Google results and jumped from “whiskey” and “oil lost in transportation” to “icestorms”.
So I turned to my faithful friend, businessdictionary.com, which defines ‘outage‘ as:
“Loss of electrical power long enough to interrupt a firm’s essential business, data processing system, support services, and/or other activities that may result in loss of income or associated liabilities.”
Is it me? Or is that the one and only clearly written definition in the whole of businessdictionary.com?
May be I’m beginning to understand the words.
