What Do You Mean?

 I received a work-related email asking me if I had the bandwidth to do a certain project. I thought, "What a dumb question. I work at a University with high-speed Internet - I have the bandwidth to do just about any project you want." My reply to the email was more politically correct - "Of course. I'll send you the finished project next week."

However, when I received a similar inquiry a few weeks later, I had to ask my boss, "Am I missing something? Because this colleague keeps asking me if I have enough bandwidth and I can't see why she would be concerned with the amount of data my Internet connection can handle."

My boss was astonished at my confusion. She explained that in the world of business 'bandwidth' is a commonly used term -"She means do you have the resources and time to complete the project."

One of the advantages of my masters' studies is that I can apply the skills and knowledge learned in just about any field; I only have to learn the language and culture of the field. And I have worked in several different fields now - environment, education, business. But there are always some words in each field that I assume I know what they mean based on past experience only to find myself in a communication snafu.

Maybe it is because of my age, but it seems that there are more words like this in the business world than in the other fields with which I've dealt. In my current position, I felt like celebrating the first time an interoffice meeting made sense to me. Before that, they might as well been conducting the meetings in Dialect for all I understood.

I wish companies gave culture training to new recruits, like that we received in Peace Corps. High on the list would be a list of "commonly used vocabulary that do not mean what you think they mean" and "how to behave in these commonly faced situations."