Language at work!
Jan. 11th, 2010 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gothams3rdrobinDespite only submitting my last assignment a week ago, I have less than a month in which to complete the next one! *brain frazzle*
The first part's easy enough; I have to do short descriptions of two linguistic terms. Not supposed to take too long, and I'm trying to resist getting complacent about it.
The second part is an essay regarding language in the workplace, specifically the way we talk to our colleagues compared to the way we talk to our customers, and the kind of terms we might use. For example, when a group of medical or legal professionals are discussing a case, there's all sorts of words being used that is specific to their line of work, and someone outside of their circle would need translated. This can and does occur in most - if not all - occupations, including mine.
Now, the assignment asks for examples relevant to our personal experiences. This is just a tad sticky for me because my line of work comes under the jurisdiction of the Data Protection Act, so I can't just blithely talk about when Joe Bloggs phoned up and bitched because we were demanding full payment of his premium as a result of his not keeping to his credit agreement. So, I had a word with my supervisor about whether I would be able to get hold of examples to use in the essay, before going to my Operations Manager to ask him the exact same question (Had Kelly told me from the start that it wasn't likely to be possible, there would have been no point bothering Andrew). Andrew and I discussed the assignment in some detail, and it was almost like discussing a thesis proposal with my tutor! (Not that I have any prior experience with that...) He understood exactly what the assignment was about, and was reeling off a whole list of examples relevant to our specific workplace - I joked he could have done the assignment for me! *grins*
So now I have to find some time outside of my regular shifts to listen to call records for some short routine calls which demonstrate how we use language to explain our procedures and underwriting criteria to customers (the 'laymen', if you will), talk to my colleagues about the way we discuss policies amongst ourselves (using codes and abbreviations, and being able to condense the information we provide due to shared knowledge) and the kind of abbreviations we use on the policy diaries in order to quickly note down what we did/talked about.
I may even speak nicely to my friends on the India Liaison team, for a few comparisons with our colleagues in Bangalore who cope with communicating with our customers through a second language. It goes a bit above the assignment brief, but every little helps!
Had a bit of a problem at work this morning too, as they've decided to change the company's domain name to something a bit more sensible and migrated everyone's accounts over the weekend. They swore that our previous email addresses would work just fine still, but at least three of us on my team weren't receiving any emails - though we could send them - and it seems this was true of many people across the company. I think the problem was one of laziness, 'cause the issue with my email account was the the username; when I first started at the company six years ago, it followed the format "firstname.lastname@brandname.co.uk". Then they decided to 'unify everyone in the company under the same banner' *yawn* and it became userid@companyname.uk.com. Following the migration, it evolved into "Firstname Middlename.SURNAME@newcompanydoman.co.uk".
The use of capitals and spacing is deliberate. See the problem? Yeah.
Wholly aside from the fact that I do not want my middle name in my corporate email address (It's bad enough that it's in my Identifier in the From header), you would think this would have called up a system flag, if not a complete error. But apparently not. The same was true of one of my team-mates, who's surname comprises of two words (not hyphenated). Why it also happened to my supervisor, who has a comparatively ordinary name, I couldn't say. It's fixed now, but I don't appear to have had any emails since half past two on Saturday afternoon, and I can only hope I haven't missed anything vital.
The first part's easy enough; I have to do short descriptions of two linguistic terms. Not supposed to take too long, and I'm trying to resist getting complacent about it.
The second part is an essay regarding language in the workplace, specifically the way we talk to our colleagues compared to the way we talk to our customers, and the kind of terms we might use. For example, when a group of medical or legal professionals are discussing a case, there's all sorts of words being used that is specific to their line of work, and someone outside of their circle would need translated. This can and does occur in most - if not all - occupations, including mine.
Now, the assignment asks for examples relevant to our personal experiences. This is just a tad sticky for me because my line of work comes under the jurisdiction of the Data Protection Act, so I can't just blithely talk about when Joe Bloggs phoned up and bitched because we were demanding full payment of his premium as a result of his not keeping to his credit agreement. So, I had a word with my supervisor about whether I would be able to get hold of examples to use in the essay, before going to my Operations Manager to ask him the exact same question (Had Kelly told me from the start that it wasn't likely to be possible, there would have been no point bothering Andrew). Andrew and I discussed the assignment in some detail, and it was almost like discussing a thesis proposal with my tutor! (Not that I have any prior experience with that...) He understood exactly what the assignment was about, and was reeling off a whole list of examples relevant to our specific workplace - I joked he could have done the assignment for me! *grins*
So now I have to find some time outside of my regular shifts to listen to call records for some short routine calls which demonstrate how we use language to explain our procedures and underwriting criteria to customers (the 'laymen', if you will), talk to my colleagues about the way we discuss policies amongst ourselves (using codes and abbreviations, and being able to condense the information we provide due to shared knowledge) and the kind of abbreviations we use on the policy diaries in order to quickly note down what we did/talked about.
I may even speak nicely to my friends on the India Liaison team, for a few comparisons with our colleagues in Bangalore who cope with communicating with our customers through a second language. It goes a bit above the assignment brief, but every little helps!
Had a bit of a problem at work this morning too, as they've decided to change the company's domain name to something a bit more sensible and migrated everyone's accounts over the weekend. They swore that our previous email addresses would work just fine still, but at least three of us on my team weren't receiving any emails - though we could send them - and it seems this was true of many people across the company. I think the problem was one of laziness, 'cause the issue with my email account was the the username; when I first started at the company six years ago, it followed the format "firstname.lastname@brandname.co.uk". Then they decided to 'unify everyone in the company under the same banner' *yawn* and it became userid@companyname.uk.com. Following the migration, it evolved into "Firstname Middlename.SURNAME@newcompanydoman.co.uk".
The use of capitals and spacing is deliberate. See the problem? Yeah.
Wholly aside from the fact that I do not want my middle name in my corporate email address (It's bad enough that it's in my Identifier in the From header), you would think this would have called up a system flag, if not a complete error. But apparently not. The same was true of one of my team-mates, who's surname comprises of two words (not hyphenated). Why it also happened to my supervisor, who has a comparatively ordinary name, I couldn't say. It's fixed now, but I don't appear to have had any emails since half past two on Saturday afternoon, and I can only hope I haven't missed anything vital.
