Office workers are baffled by computer jargon and make serious business blunders because they see ‘IT speak’ as a foreign language, a survey has revealed.
Among office workers 26% aren’t sure what a firewall does and therefore have been tempted to turn it off and a massive 61% believed that a megabyte is some sort of a cheeseburger.
A further 23% are not sure whether to upload or download – requiring further contact with the IT department for an explanation.
“I like to explain things personally to the younger secretaries in the peace and quiet of the Server Room,” said IT administrator Chip Qubit. “I often find that I can upload much faster if I think of Angelina Jolie.”
Office administration worker Chloe Oldfield, 27, from Llandudno, admits her grasp of IT is very limited, but doesn’t feel she ought to know more.
“They might as well be speaking Welsh to me because I haven’t got a clue. Normally when the technical support people come to fix my computer I just disappear and make a cup of tea, if I can get Chip to switch on that water boiling thing for me.”
‘But I don’t feel I should know more – that is their job. If we did it all ourselves they would be out of a job.”
Yes, you’ve seen through their scheme now Chloe.
And it isn’t just the older generation who feel out of the loop – 54% of office workers under 30 have made a blunder because of confusion over the meaning of IT jargon.
“What the hell does ‘out of the loop’ mean?” said one respondent, “Why can’t you just use existing, normal words instead of trying to be clever and making stuff up?”
Asked for his comments, a senior robot for Microsoft said:
“Do your SLA’s specify stringent RTO’s and RPO’s? How about near-instant access to critical applications?”
Yeah, ok, so I copied that last bit from a letter I got this morning.
