You have been Acronymed!

I recently started a new job with an organisation that is so obssed with Acronyms! so much so the organisation's name is an Acronym by itself, IBM. The downside of getting comfy with such acronyms is that over a period of time people tend to forget what the expansion of these acronyms are. On my first day, during the new hire induction session when the instructor asked what does IBM stand for some character in the class stood up and said with confidence Indian Business Machine!

When you talk to people who have been with this organisation for quite sometime, their sentances will start with acronyms, end with acronyms and acronyms will be sprinked at regular intervals within the sentance. After an entire day of joining formalities, I walked up to the instructor and asked how to go about getting my workstation set up, promptly came a response - "You are going to part of EUS in ITD so you will not be able to request for your TP at MTP, you'll need to go to EGL and contact your people manager for the same." For a minute I thought the instructor was caling out the 26 alphabets in english but got the order totally mixed up. I still had a little hope that the random callout of alphabets had some hidden message in it, so I gathered some courage to ask her for the "english translation of what she just said." After she explained the samething without using any acronyms, I understood that the moral of the story was - my work location is a different office in Bangalore hence I will need to get there and speak to my boss regading the same.

I was really getting lost with these acronyms that was thrown at me day in a day out. One day I was telling one of my colleagues about how lost I was with these acronyms and he told me that everytime I need to know what an acronym stands for I could go to BOT. I asked him "BOT? what is the expansion of BOT?" He said he wasn't sure but if I type an acronym in that application it will provide the expansion of the same.

After spending a week in my new job, I bumped into one of my instructors who conducted the onboarding session when I joined IBM. She asked me how things are going and I said "I'm completely lost here especially with these acronyms that people keep throwing." You won't believe what she told me, she said "I know these TLAs could be very confusing at times." It was at that moment I realised that I was such a good artist, I was 'drawing' blank all these days. I returned to reality in a few seconds to ask her what TLA stood for, but by then she was gone.

I then followed my colleague's advice and opened up BOT and typed TLA, it said TLA stands for Three Letter Acronym. Wow! An acronym for acronyms! I was glad that BOT could make my life simple and I won't be lost anymore. Just then I received a meeting invite for a daily meeting called the DMH call, I was pretty certain what I should do to figure out what the call is all about. I pulled up BOT and typed in DMH and the search result came up with District Mental Hospital! While I was still baffled with what just happened, one of my team members told me DMH stands for Daily metric Huddle.

The other day I was talking to one of my team members to find out if he had complated all the paper work required to hire new people. So I asked him, "Have you rolled out the BBMPs?" He appeared clueless, "Have you rolled out the BBMPs?" I asked him again. Now BBMP stands for Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, its a government agnecy that deals with cerfiying / approving properties in Bangalore. This guy must have wondered why on earth would I ask him about BBMP, he quickly reasied what was going on and he said, "actually the term you are looking for is BBSI."

Now after spending a couple of months I've been acronymed too and I also use some acronyms very frequently such as yw. np. tx. I also use some US Military acronyms such as WTF, FUBAR, SSDD, BOHICA, SNAFU, TGIF, OFIM, etc.