Unnecessary Quotation Marks
I was troubleshooting memory issues on an IBM x3650 recently when I noticed this “warning” stamped on the memory sticks:
What exactly do they mean by “hot surface“? What’s the deal with the unnecessary quotation marks? By “hot surface” do they actually mean “bacon sandwich”, “monkey granola”, or perhaps even “hoverboard switchblade”? What’s the message they’re trying to convey?
You’d think that after investing years of development time and spending the millions of dollars required to manufacture a cutting edge DIMM stick that this particular tech manufacturer would have at least one employee on staff with a worthless college degree in English that could tell them when not to use confusing quotation marks. Heck, should I “be concerned” when my servers start “acting up“, requiring me to “run diagnostics” to discover “where the problem lies“?
I’ll be the first one to admit that I am not the smartest man in a room stuffed full to the rafters with painfully slow savants, but…..ARGH! Will you please stop mangling the English language?
Speaking of the English Language… Does it bother anyone else that you have “Dial 1 for English”… last time I checked, we were in America… This is America Jack, we shouldn’t have to dial 1!
I’ve always found that a bit frustrating. I’m not a xenophobe, but please stop making me jump through hoops simply because I want to conduct business in the native language.
Somewhere there is a correctly punctuated email telling the Chinese manufacturer to add “Hot surface” to the warning on the heat sink. But don’t get me started on gratuitous apostrophe’s.
Heh…you might be on to something there, Dan.