IT industry words or phrases that make your heart sink....

[Eirikur]

"touch base"
"I need a one slide PPT"
"accenture are coming"'
"we don't have business requirements documented but we need you to produce an RFP and need the repsonse (of the 150 page RFP within 2 weeks"
"india"

[CoolCat]

PA Consulting wrote the ITT (it will largely be a cut and paste of other ITT's in completely unrelated areas, and make it completely impossible to respond in a sensible way)

[Eirikur]

"It was developed 8 years ago as a temporary solution, the guy who did it left 5 years ago and it's not documented, oh yeah and it is a business critical system" (major UK retailer)

[OwlHoot]

Team building exercise
Christmas party

Funnily enough, I don't mind those (although I'm always worried HMR&C will get wind of my attendance at them )

[original PM]

PA Consulting wrote the ITT (it will largely be a cut and paste of other ITT's in completely unrelated areas, and make it completely impossible to respond in a sensible way)

Lol I though PA were quite good.

mainly because they came into our environment where the exec's said IT 'were tulip'.

And after a few review sessions PA said to the exec 'IT are not tulip, you have absolutely no idea how IT in a business this size runs and you cannot try and run projects with no requirements just so you can stamp your feet and cry and expect everything you did want to be included (but had not stated) for free in the next 20 minutes'

[Platypus]

Evangelist

[NotAllThere]

Arek called.

(Utterly useless, thick lazy Pole in my client's Polish IT support centre).

[administrator]

I thought you were setting up the backups...

[MrMarkyMark]

The tape machine is broken.

(Then had to rely on my personal back up to get Production back up and running)

[WTFH]

"maternity cover"


...as in "We've taken on this person for maternity cover, they left university last week with a degree in sociology. We haven't time to train them, so would you mind doing it as they are now working in finance."


The answer was initially "no", as I don't do the financial side of systems, but changed to "yes" when I realised they were the one who processed my invoices.