An American Geek in Paris — Chapter 6 — PDM
It’s been so long since I wrote my last post that people have stopped asking when I’m going to write my next one. I conclude that supply now matches demand.
A couple weeks ago my wife and I attended a joint MIT Club of France/Ivy League Alumni get together in the gluten-free 9th arrondissement, a short walk from my office. As you might expect the crowd at such an event tends to be highly educated, very well traveled, and pretty interesting. The native French members of the MIT club are mostly Sloan School of Management MBAs but there are a few people who attended MIT as undergrads and studied actual engineering, i.e. geeks that speak my language. The Ivy league grads that showed up were an assortment of lawyers, corporate executives, and one free electron who was about to leave for a long trip of discovery in Asia.
Talking to non-geek carbon life forms limits my range of topics. In Silicon Valley I rarely faced this challenge because almost everyone is in tech and the vast majority of conversations revolve around a core set of topics: technology, startups, traffic, and burning man. In Paris I often feel like a fish out of water — I’m certainly in no position to talk about fashion, French politics are opaque to me, and I follow an English football club instead of PSG. It also seems that no one here has seen the cult classic Office Space, Mike Judge’s early work that eventually led to HBO’s Silicon Valley, so red stapler jokes are non-starters.
So what to talk about?
A young Russian woman who had somehow managed to get a Sloan MBA while living in Kuala Lumpur asked me what I did for a living. After briefly describing my real job I ad-libbed:
I have a side gig developing acronyms, my going rate is 10,000€ a letter.
She didn’t buy it but her Harvard law grad friend looked at me incredulously and started asking me all sorts of questions including what famous acronyms I might be responsible for.
GDPR — you’ve heard of it? It is some of my best work! I even got paid twice, once for the English version and once for RGPD for the French.
Well a lot of laughs and wine followed as we took turns riffing on the concept of a business built solely around the creation of acronyms. But with all I didn’t even crack the top 10 in terms of interesting people at the event.
A long time ago while I was still a student we did a bunch of research for NASA and I got my hands on their printed book of acronyms. Americans love acronyms and NASA really loves acronyms. My favorites at the time were the DCE and RCE — respectively disposable collation enhancer and reusable collation enhancer. wtf are those you ask? A staple and a paper clip, respectively.
Working and living in France brings with it the challenge of not only dealing with full words and sentences in French (not to mention the franglais I gripped about in my first post) but also abbreviations and acronyms.
The first one I was challenged with at work was TAF. In my first few days at work this was coming up in conversations all the time. I eventually figured out from context that it meant “Travail à Faire” or “Work to do.”
On a du sacré TAF
Elle a fait du bon TAF
After awhile I realized that while travail à faire is in the future tense but it’s often used in the past tense. Elle a fait du bon TAF literally translates to she did some good work to be done. I’ve also heard on a du TAF a faire which is we have work to do to do. This seems like a recursion error so I challenged some of my French colleagues about this:
L’utilisation de votre acronyme est complètement fucké!
Some of them hadn’t even thought about what the acronym spelled out — it just meant work to them. It’s like English words such as laser that started as acronyms then entered the vernacular. Then they went back to their taf.
The next one that briefly threw me was CoDir. Again from context I realized that it means “Comité de Direction” or literally “Executive Committee.” In a US company this would normally be the “Exec Team” because Americans know from watching Congress that committees don’t normally do jack. The French executives and even the non-French ones who are members of the exec team always refer to each other as the CoDir which led to an amusing moment during an all-hands when a non-French employee asked “Could you explain what CoDir means?” Who said running a global, multilingual company while generating du bon ÉBITDA was easy?
wtf, somewhat surprisingly, turns out to be a very popular acronym in France. Popular American culture permeates French life, especially Internet life and le cinéma. It’s not clear if wtaf has made much of an impression yet. Chat shorthand is a mixed bag. afaik I’m the only one who ever uses afaik in the office. There’s not much imo or iirc but lol and fml are common enough. Regrettably and fwiw, rtfm has yet to enter French geek culture.
Did I mention the French love GIFs and memes? /giphy is the most popular command on our slack. It’s like Jerry Lewis for French millennials. No all-hands or sprint ceremony can be complete without one.
Aujourd’hui (today) is a PIA to type so it gets abbreviated to ajd. Which reminds me of the time long ago that I said in irc that something was a PIA and that notified a colleague in Denmark named Pia who asked me what I meant and then I had to sheepishly explain that I was not referring to her and that I thought she was a very nice person and that yes, I would be happy to slot some of her projects earlier in our schedule.
As a (recently world famous) acronym writer I’m free to make up acronyms anytime. When a French colleague thanks me for something in slack I’ll usually answer with pdq (pas de quoi or you’re welcome) but that shorthand isn’t common. A+ is à plus or ttyl for you Anglos. That one passes. There’s a list of course but I rarely see most of these used. If France is going to play with Silicon Valley it needs to up its shorthand game.
I was feeling a bit behind quota today so once I was done filling out my TPS reports I took the most popular French expletive Putain de Merde, abbreviated it to pdm and started using it, just as freely as the French use the full expression, i.e. all the gd time. At first my colleagues wondered what I was talking about then they got it and during our Friday evening office ping-pong and beer-fest they all enthusiastically started using it whenever they lost a point.
Then a colleague sarcastically, and without any provocation whatsoever, modified the meaning to be Putain de Michel.
ty, that will be 50k€.
