OutRaged

The IT department never ceases to amuse me with their very serious emails announcing a system outRage on this-and-that day. I would always wonder how a seemingly innocent system shutdown could tantamount to an outRage.

I didn't realise my folly until I saw the "Scheduled outage at 4:00PM PST" warning on blogger.com. Could this outage be the same outRage I had in mind? Could blogger.com have committed a spelling error?

In times of linguistic uncertainties like these, I had to google outage to find out if the word really exists. Sure enough, it's a perfectly legit word. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines "outage" as

1: a quantity or bulk of something lost in transportation or storage
2 a: a failure or interruption in use or functioning b: a period of interruption especially of electric current

I'm quite appalled with myself, not because I didn't know this word before, but because I've just proven myself right - that I'm as blind as a batty old bat. Why do IT people have to confuse us with technical jargons like this? Why can't they use proper terms, like "shutdown" or "interruption" or just say it in more words "the system will be unavailable...".

Anyway, like what I always like to say, we learn something new everyday.....