Dances with Names

I’m on my continuing my odyssey into researching Smart Grid topics for work. I’ve had to stop and develop a Smart Grid acronym glossary. It’s really sad when there are so many hard to understand terms floating around… that you have to list them out in order to read a simple three page document. DMS, OMS, FLISR… I really am wondering if a set of preschooler’s magnetic letters might be a good purchase. I can’t keep them straight. I’m reading a white paper now… which is by a competitor so it shall remain nameless… that uses nine different acronyms in the same paragraph. I literally read it… and spent the next five minutes flipping backwards through the document to find out where they were all spelled out. If you’re going to go that acronym-crazy… spell them out every few pages so losers like me don’t forget what you’re talking about when your Outage Management System (OMS) is linked to your Network Topology Processor (NTP) which is tied into your Geographic Information System (GIS) all receiving commands from your DMS via SCADA.

Makes “deely-bobber” and “thing-a-ma-gig” sound positively descriptive…

Anyway… creating a glossary of unusual terms when creating a technical document is always a good idea. And it’s usually a step I fudge. And since I’m trying to get back into the “Do what I say because that’s what I do” philosophy of technical writing… I’ll divulge a few technical glossary tips.

When writing up an instruction manual, the first thing I usually do is look at what the engineer named the “wingle-ma-doodle” on the print. Sometimes there are three “L Brackets” or “Spacer Washers” and I need to differentiate between them somehow. Sometimes I’m starting my draft before the design is finished… and I get to name the wingle-ma-doodle. That can be dangerous, because my inclination is to name everything “George” so I can love it, and hug it… and have it be my best friend. Aren’t you my best friend George? (If you didn’t watch “Marvin the Martian” cartoons… disregard the above.)

But since my second inclination is to give things a name that is descriptive, I’m usually OK. First I start by taking a snapshot of the product… or ask the designer to send me an exploded view of the drawing. And… I label all of the parts. This usually gets tacked up on my cubicle wall somewhere for the duration of the project… so whenever I’m writing and can’t remember whether it’s a Belleville or a lockwasher… I have that information right in front of me. If fasteners need a certain torque… I jot it down next to the fastener callout on my diagram. If things need lubricant or some other kind of surface prep… I’ll try to jot that out too. Usually it’s something like wire brushing… or grease removal. Grease can have a part number… or can be something considered industry standard. Like aluminum conductor prep compound… I’ll call out what we suggest… and then ask the engineer if the customer is OK using their favorite aluminum prep if the stuff we use is unavailable. I’ll try to make any notes on places where an instructional tag or label might be needed. This is my “master sheet” and usually ends up crinkled and coffee-stained at the end of a project.

How often to I actually have the luxury to do this? Well… a lot less often then I like to admit. Sometimes I’m scrambling so hard… I don’t know what I’m called… much less the product I’m documenting. I don’t have time… or the engineer changes the part and now naming it the shunt latch won’t work because it neither shunts… nor latches… and I have to pull a new name out of my rectum and hope that the gods of “find and replace” are with me. Often… they aren’t. Changing the name of a part is a sure-fire way of inserting errors into documentation. Not for the faint of heart…

But this white paper writing about high level stuff is more difficult. It’s a lot of acronyms for names made up by people who don’t have any idea how to functionally name something… or who don’t know how to be brief. (Because SCADA… or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition is not intuitive… unless you’re sex life is really, really dull…ya know? For one… the “Supervisory” is kind of ambiguous as to what it means… usually it means monitored by a computer. Or monitored by a computer and including an interface for human interaction. Usually it collects data and allows some sort of pre-programmed external set of control parameters tell it what to do. So if you have one of these nifty digital thermostats that receive signals from an indoor/outdoor weather station… before it makes the decision on whether or not to kick on your furnace…or turn on your humidifier…then there’s some SCADA going on somewhere…between the weather station…thermostat…furnace…and whatever dingle-dongle you use inside your house to monitor the temperature of your living room.

Anyway… now that I’m trying to figure out how a GIS connects with a DMS… I’ve found it helpful to make myself a table of acronyms, what they stand for, and a brief description. I have to keep stopping and adding things… and eventually it will need to be alphabetized… but for now it’s a start. A real professional indexer could tell you an easier way… but sometimes a simple list works. It’s kept me in groceries for the last 25 years…