Been horrifying teammates by referring to undocumented information that's held only in people's heads as "locked in meat storage".

Please use this with your teams/projects and report back on how they like it?

@jessie Instead of saying "I'll remember that" I'm gonna start saying "I'll back that up to my meat storage"
@jonty @jessie "please give me a moment while my meat storage processes that"
@viq @jonty @jessie if you’ve not read it before… They’re Made of Meat by Terry Bisson. https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
They're Made out of Meat

@jessie now I need the plural noun for meat storage. A rattling?
@jessie the German translation would be "Fleischspeicher" - a tongue twister due to the two "sh" sounds following each other
@DerPumu even worse in German, love it, thank you
@DerPumu @jessie and both are pronounced different….
@DerPumu @jessie Meat cluster? Mixed grill? 😆
@DerPumu @jessie
Sausage rack, because information links
@DerPumu
Idk that, but a multiple catastrophic failure would undoubtedly be called a traffic accident, because holders of such storage gain a high bus factor.
@jessie
@jessie That’s brilliant! I am totally going to use it.
@jessie so good 100% accurate
@jessie Thanks for that.
I'll put it in my meat storage for later use
@jessie cold storage, hot storage, warm and squishy storage

@virtulis @jessie

💽 Hard disk
💾 Floppy disk
🧠 Squishy disk

Artistic Ownership

The managers at many places I have worked confuse the fruits of our work (lines and lines of programming code) with “intellectual property” ...

@JeffC1956 oh, added to my to-read queue, thank you!

@jessie
stored in my gelatinous wetware 🧠

EDIT:
i had no idea my through-away comment, Gelatious WetWare had so much traction! Thank you! kind Mastodon People!🙂

"May your Gelatinous WetWare serve you long & well!" 🧠

@Sine_Nomine @jessie Gelatinous Wetware is a Pratchett villain you can't fool me
@pikesley @jessie dammit! I thought it sounded to good to be made up just by me! 😢
@Sine_Nomine @jessie I don't think it's *really* a Pratchett villain, but the phrase has the music of a Pratchett-pastiching-Dickens character name
@pikesley @Sine_Nomine @jessie if Prarchett wrote Cyberpunk....
@jessie Tacit knowledge: 🚫
Tasty knowledge: ✅

@jessie

Shop I worked in during the '80s referred to programmers generally as "the meatware."

Welcome to the party!

@jessie idk why but that reminds me about the fact that AOL free trial disks were stuck into packs of frozen meat and somehow survived the trip.
@Octoomy @jessie I remember those discs being everywhere, but somehow they were even more everywhere than I knew
@jessie
Perhaps the more horrifying issue is institutional knowledge located in an imperfect memory bank.
I’ve forgotten more than my coworkers will ever learn.

@jessie
Oh God, I just translated that to your saying.

I’ve let more meat go rotten than my coworkers have ever butchered.

@jessie i love this - I’d almost be willing to come out of retirement just to say this
@jessie People also get funny about referring to “the world about us” as Meatspace (as opposed to Cyberspace). I’m going to reintroduce this for in person meetings (meatings?)

@gilesdring @jessie "meatings"

I can't believe that was just sitting there through the whole pandemic and Zoom and Teams things.

"They want a return to office so we can sit through more 'meatings'."

@Urban_Hermit @gilesdring @jessie

Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings.

They did it by killing all those who opposed them.

@jessie omg  all of my license plates are locked in meat storage
@jessie I love this. I did a thing when doing system architecture a while back of starting to add people's brains into the diagrams for legacy systems; I think it's a useful concept! https://www.dxw.com/2022/07/legacy-tech-systems-are-like-the-walking-dead/
Attack of the IT Zombies (or why legacy tech systems are like the walking dead) - dxw

How we can transform the data and connections in legacy tech intentionally and effectively so people can do their best work.

dxw
@Floppy @jessie *makes note for the document I have to write about technical legacy / debt in the university sector*

@Floppy Ohhh that is a great idea. Drawing system diagrams is something I love to make sense of how our tangled systems work or don't work - definitely need to start adding in little photos of the people who make some of the processes *actually* work.

@jessie

@jessie I hate this and also will be using it at every available opportunity
@jessie paging Terry Bisson. Terry Bisson to the phone made out of meat...
@jessie
I work with field crews.
I don't want to use this because I think they will love it at first sight.
@jessie this is horrible and I'm absolutely going to boost it after I press Post

@jessie I’ll use that to describe the immense loss of knowledge after people leave too.

“Yeah it’s locked in meat storage that went to market”

@jessie Tried it out, got a one-word response: “crikey”.

As intended, I suspect. Good work!

@jessie I told him, and I all nom noms broke loose

@jessie

I like it. Keep it in "meat storage" or they'll lay your ass off the moment they know all you know.

"I need you to document what you typically do each day... "

(Because the guy in India taking your job after next week, likes to work off a script.)

@Sunny @jessie
Well make sure you add some ridiculously pointless things in there, ideally something that will break something.

@econads @jessie

I prefer to give a very technical long-winded yet precise instruction set that only a highly qualified individual can understand well enough to ask about the missing steps.

If the PM immediately sets up a call to go through the information with someone named Abhai, reschedule the call for two weeks out and update your LinkedIn profile.

@jessie Love it. Gonna really lean into it and start using the phrase "meat-written" too. As in "that information is only meat-written right now, but we should probably plan some time to digitally transcribe it".
@drsbaitso @jessie “Meat” & greet anyone? 😁
@jessie I like to remind my team of the guy I worked with, who died of a heart-attack at his home-office desk while working late one night, when I insist on documentation.
It's a lot more effective than "what if you win the lottery?" and doesn't draw nearly the same level of HR disapproval as "what if you got run over by my bus?"

@ftp_alun @jessie

I have used the phrase "in case I get hit by a bus", dozens of times, right after explaining where my current documentation and project tracking files are located. People die, get hurt, retire, quit, but if your culture is to share/document, maybe it isn't all in my meat-storage. Oh, fun fact, our coldest office space is lovingly referred to as the "meat locker".

@jessie give the information to the entire team and you've stored it in RAUM, the redundant array of unreliable meat. In German I think that's "space" or "room", so you've got the alternate interpretation of piling boxes of papers in a spare bedroom for eventual (but not easy or reliable) retrieval?

@jessie Well they can protest all they like, what are they gonna do, make disgusting meat sounds with their meat?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

("They're Made of Meat" video short based on the Terry Bisson short story, about two aliens discussing, and being horrified that their investigations around Humans have discovered they are made of disgusting meat instead of silicon or metal (its never really discussed what the "good" alternative is or should be))

They're Made Out of Meat

Auf YouTube findest du großartige Videos und erstklassige Musik. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder mit der ganzen Welt teilen.

YouTube

@jessie

Heh, I like to call it "Imaginary Documentation" and let them argue that it's wrong.

@jessie "nearline meatware storage."