Been horrifying teammates by referring to undocumented information that's held only in people's heads as "locked in meat storage".
Please use this with your teams/projects and report back on how they like it?
Jun 25, 2025, 9:55 AM@jessie Instead of saying "I'll remember that" I'm gonna start saying "I'll back that up to my meat storage"
Jun 25, 2025, 4:41 PM
@viq @jonty @jessie if you’ve not read it before… They’re Made of Meat by Terry Bisson. https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
Jun 27, 2025, 8:56 AM
@jessie now I need the plural noun for meat storage. A rattling?
@jessie the German translation would be "Fleischspeicher" - a tongue twister due to the two "sh" sounds following each other
@DerPumu even worse in German, love it, thank you
Jun 25, 2025, 12:57 PM
@jessie so good 100% accurate
@jessie cold storage, hot storage, warm and squishy storage
@jessie SMV or Secure Meat Vault
@jessie
I have a few words to say about that...
https://artinbsd.blogspot.com/2011/02/artistic-understanding.html
@JeffC1956 oh, added to my to-read queue, thank you!
@jessie
stored in my gelatinous wetware 🧠
EDIT:
i had no idea my through-away comment, Gelatious WetWare had so much traction! Thank you! kind Mastodon People!🙂
"May your Gelatinous WetWare serve you long & well!" 🧠
Jun 25, 2025, 12:41 PM@Sine_Nomine @jessie Gelatinous Wetware is a Pratchett villain you can't fool me
Jun 25, 2025, 1:13 PM@Sine_Nomine @jessie I don't think it's *really* a Pratchett villain, but the phrase has the music of a Pratchett-pastiching-Dickens character name
@pikesley @Sine_Nomine @jessie if Prarchett wrote Cyberpunk....
@jessie Tacit knowledge: 🚫
Tasty knowledge: ✅
Shop I worked in during the '80s referred to programmers generally as "the meatware."
Welcome to the party!
@Professor_Stevens MEATWARE!!!
Jun 25, 2025, 12:43 PM@jessie idk why but that reminds me about the fact that AOL free trial disks were stuck into packs of frozen meat and somehow survived the trip.
@jessie
Perhaps the more horrifying issue is institutional knowledge located in an imperfect memory bank.
I’ve forgotten more than my coworkers will ever learn.
@jessie People also get funny about referring to “the world about us” as Meatspace (as opposed to Cyberspace). I’m going to reintroduce this for in person meetings (meatings?)
@gilesdring @jessie "meatings"
I can't believe that was just sitting there through the whole pandemic and Zoom and Teams things.
"They want a return to office so we can sit through more 'meatings'."
@Urban_Hermit @gilesdring @jessie
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings.
They did it by killing all those who opposed them.
@jessie omg :blobcatlaugh: all of my license plates are locked in meat storage
@jessie I love this. I did a thing when doing system architecture a while back of starting to add people's brains into the diagrams for legacy systems; I think it's a useful concept! https://www.dxw.com/2022/07/legacy-tech-systems-are-like-the-walking-dead/
@jessie paging Terry Bisson. Terry Bisson to the phone made out of meat...
Jun 25, 2025, 2:00 PM@jessie
I work with field crews.
I don't want to use this because I think they will love it at first sight.
@jessie I’ll use that to describe the immense loss of knowledge after people leave too.
“Yeah it’s locked in meat storage that went to market”
@jessie Tried it out, got a one-word response: “crikey”.
As intended, I suspect. Good work!
@jessie I told him, and I all nom noms broke loose
I like it. Keep it in "meat storage" or they'll lay your ass off the moment they know all you know.
"I need you to document what you typically do each day... "
(Because the guy in India taking your job after next week, likes to work off a script.)
I prefer to give a very technical long-winded yet precise instruction set that only a highly qualified individual can understand well enough to ask about the missing steps.
If the PM immediately sets up a call to go through the information with someone named Abhai, reschedule the call for two weeks out and update your LinkedIn profile.
@jessie Love it. Gonna really lean into it and start using the phrase "meat-written" too. As in "that information is only meat-written right now, but we should probably plan some time to digitally transcribe it".
@drsbaitso @jessie “Meat” & greet anyone? 😁
@jessie I like to remind my team of the guy I worked with, who died of a heart-attack at his home-office desk while working late one night, when I insist on documentation.
It's a lot more effective than "what if you win the lottery?" and doesn't draw nearly the same level of HR disapproval as "what if you got run over by my bus?"
Jun 25, 2025, 2:28 PM@jessie give the information to the entire team and you've stored it in RAUM, the redundant array of unreliable meat. In German I think that's "space" or "room", so you've got the alternate interpretation of piling boxes of papers in a spare bedroom for eventual (but not easy or reliable) retrieval?
@jessie Well they can protest all they like, what are they gonna do, make disgusting meat sounds with their meat?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
("They're Made of Meat" video short based on the Terry Bisson short story, about two aliens discussing, and being horrified that their investigations around Humans have discovered they are made of disgusting meat instead of silicon or metal (its never really discussed what the "good" alternative is or should be))
@jessie "nearline meatware storage."
@jessie meat storage saves jobs though :fingerguns:
Jun 25, 2025, 3:31 PM@jessie WOW. I read through over 2/3 of the comments before I figured out that you weren't talking about undocumented people locked in an ICE facility. I was like, "these people like their humor DARK"! 😅
@jessie Thanks, I hate it. 😂
tangential — one of my teams used to talk about the “bus factor” for the risk of meat documentation being lost to a car crash
Then one of our team was rear ended badly enough to be out for months
We had to come up with new terms because “bus factor” was too vivid and violent in reality
PLUS of course it wasn’t a bus, it was a big personal pickup
@clew Similar, I used to use the “big red bus” factor when talking about people resilience and key person risk. Until someone senior pointed out they were hit by an actual bus and taken out of a programme for a couple of months
@jessie I can see many opportunities to use “meat storage” coming up. That’s brilliant.
"won the lottery risk" worked okay for us, I think. Implying "called in rich, back never"
@clew @jessie @JeffGrigg
A team I worked with used "lottery number", for someone leaving because they won the lottery.
@jessie Reminds me of an early 1980s joke about relying on 'ones visceral computer'!😀
@jessie A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with some colleagues about data “lakes”, and before I could stop myself I posited “does that mean we’re moist with data?”
I have a real love/hate relationship with my meat locker.
@garrettc horrific, inspiring, I love/hate this
@jessie “The meat storage wants to examine the moist data” is a sentence I feel I will regret typing for the rest of my life.
@jessie @funnelfiasco buddy twisted this to keeping this safe from ai in the meat locker
Jun 25, 2025, 6:24 PM@jessie *yoink*