The World of Acronyms
I can never understand what is wrong with the Americans and their obsession with acronyms. My first encounter with them was years ago, in an inter-company board meeting. Dressed casual as previously instructed, we were sitting around a big U-shaped table. At the open edge of the table was a screen on which various slides about development, financials and various stuff would be shown.
The gentleman, well, supposedly higher ranking than the rest of us took the microphone and a parade of acronyms began. One after the other, non-stop, a myriad of acronyms were being shot at us, without showing any sign of mercy or regret: kpi, pnl, bs, pso, tsr, roi, abc, def.. The list was long. Do not get me wrong. I knew what he was talking about, that bs stood for balance sheet, not bullshit for example, but the scene was so surreal that it was like we were orbiting the Earth in a shuttle, and all those acronyms were floating in the cabin at zero gravity. At one point, I almost opened my mouth to catch and swallow one (Now you know what goes on inside those board meetings; making thousands per hour while you are sweating for a few bucks is not so easy). I poured myself a cup of coffee, instead.
Everything was fine and smooth for a while. When I was just about to finish my coffee, I heard the man saying “We have to enhance these scalable metrics so that…” and that was it. I wanted to laugh, but could not, I had to spit my coffee but could not, either. I was feeling like an object in space, at a La Grange point between two gravitational pulls, spit or swallow. During that brief moment which seemed to last a few minutes as if it was trying to prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity vis-a-vis the coffee in my mouth (I want a nomination for this phrase, by the way), time for me virtually stopped. Fortunately somebody asked a question and swallow won.
I have learned two new acronyms today and invented one: SAHM, WAHM and WAHP. “Study/Work at Home Moms” are the new generation of women who taught me those. I am forever grateful to them. They are not only pretending to study and work while doing the real hard work, they are also very active in the blogging scene. To name a few, A Bit of This and That and Mary’s Madness comes to mind. Between those heartfelt sentences, they make you a part of their world.
So you think WAHP is “work at home papa”, eh? No, it is not. Did I tell you that Turkish is a genderless language? Unlike Latin languages, words do not imply gender (think of Schueler/Schuelerin, etc in German) in Turkish. Following the tradition of 21st century, just like we do not say businessman any more, I have taken the liberty of creating the acronym WAHP, “work at home person.” In this era of equal opportunity, it will be more appropriate, I should think.
Ah, the storm has started. Good thing I did the shopping already.
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