File this under "one of those days"

Power cut out - everyone thought it was a general blackout, but it turned out to be localized to some of the offices in our building. Problem was, when the computer went down, it took out the translation I'd spent the morning working on.

Dear Microsoft: while I appreciate the automatic backup feature of Word, please tell me you've made it more robust in the recent versions? I nearly had a heart attack thinking that I'd lost the entire morning's work, until the help file (thanks for that as well, by the way) pointed me at the autobackup file's location.

And while I'm at it:

Dear publishers of the Hellenic Government Gazette: there's a convention in the English language that when an abbreviation is used in an official document, the first time it turns up, it's spelled out in full. I know you don't write in English, but is spelling out the abbreviations once per document really too much to ask?

Temperatures and tempers

Not the best of days. Mercury reached a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and it looks like there may have been a rolling blackout. Plus, tempers at the office were flaring somewhat. Lots of loud, strident conversations.

I'd say it was a pain in the butt ... except that when I'm exposed to an unhealthy psychological atmosphere, the pain is centered about six inches further up my spine than that.

Just to reiterate on abbreviations...

When I was growing up, my dad kept beating into my head that using abbreviations and language shortcuts was a Bad Thing - he basically implied that it was generally used by people who wanted to lord it over anyone who didn't understand what they were saying.

One time, on an ambulance call, I had to admit I could see his point. This was early in my ambulance days (I almost called it "my ambulance career", but one bone of contention I had with the brass at the corps was that it was never a career for me); as we were getting ready to roll, the crew chief yelled into the back of the rig: "It's an MI! We've got to move! It's an MI!"

"Ready to roll - what's an MI, Bob?"

"Myocardial infarction!"

"Myocardial ...?"

"Heart attack!"

(I'd just finished the basic life support class - emphasis on "basic". We weren't taught that a heart attack was a "myocardial infarction" - the instructors just said "heart attack". We were more worried about emergency treatment than esoteric terminology.)

On the other hand, many years later, text-message language raised his ire a little, but I had to take the other side. Fundamentally, the abbreviations in text messaging are about data compression - if you've only got 160 characters to get your point across, then you need to find ways to compact it, strip out bits of info that can be filled in at the other end from context. It's like back in the day when the fastest means of communication was the telegram, and Western Union charged by the word.

But if you're not paying by the word or the character, and you're writing something that a stranger may read, then it's only polite to spell out abbreviations, at least the first time you use them.

That's my opinion, anyway. If it's just communication among friends, that's one thing; shorthand makes sense in a lot of cases then. But for strangers ...

...anyway. Just a gripe over the Hellenic Government Gazette. Doesn't help that they use a completely different dialect of Greek from the colloquial spoken Greek.

I think I may need to take a class in Katharevousa, as well as remedial Greek.