What's in a word: Safety Signal and other Word Acrobatics



'Your son has had an accident'. I vividly recall the formulation delivered to me over the phone, at the office, by the polished voice at the other end of the wire. Scary stuff no parent wants to hear. Not even if the accident means that your four-year old pooed in his pants and the manicured staff at the private school across the road won't touch the "situation". Or shall we say, the incident. The issue, maybe?

Anyone who has worked in IT knows that testing is part of life and sh't happens. Not that we call it as such (unless we think there is no upper rank within hearing range). We  used to call it problem, like in "problem report" and "problem solved". But one rainy day, someone, somewhere, must have decided this expression is, well, problematic, and the more precise term defect became popular. However, defect has a bad connotation (and possibly a smelly rhyme too, given the right typo); our programs are not supposed to have defects, so why not call these incidents instead. What a classy, all-encompassing, non-threatening word! Unless it is a MI (Major Incident), in which case upper management must be alerted immediately and hell usually breaks lose. But these are rare enough occurrences. After careful analysis, a common incident morphs into a problem (yes!), if it was determined that code needs to be fixed, or into a service request, if there is something else at fault. 

Fault! Another word that could be used to say something went wrong. "Whose fault?" is usually the next thought - not exactly a team-building exercise. So let's forget it. Someone just said occurrence! I have yet to see this in practice, like in "we have an occurrence in this module", or "occurrence report" - but that doesn't mean it's not actually in use in some shop already. It's another well scrubbed term, and why not be very careful and correct with our IT words  - IT should not be left behind when it comes to politically correct vocabulary. Office politics, that is; I recall a manager requesting that the word "situation" be used instead of "problem" in all client communications.

I am afraid I could go on, and totally forget about the latest and greatest construction meant to basically say "we think we kind of have screwed up": safety signal! I like it!! So professional, so virtuously sounding!!!. First heard in the context of covid reporting, when the number of unexpected "situations" passed over an admissible threshold. I wonder whether an SLA  was in place for the expected and tolerable number of  issues or incidents or problems (or accidents) for the solution put in production without sufficient testing. Even without one, this expression may mutate to find (infect? conquer?) new hosts. After all, no one should hear "your son had an accident".


Last updated: 2021 May 12

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