[techtalk] Re; biscuit jack

[Wood, Mary]

lothan at newsguy.com muses...

> I just wanna know which marketeer came up with the nondescript 
> term "biscuit jack" for a simple surface-mount phone jack. It 
> doesn't look anything like a biscuit to me. Sounds rather similar 
> to those "neoprene high energy impact devices" the US military 
> purchased for a grand each instead of going to the local hardware 
> store and purchasing a garden variety hammer for five bucks. :-) 

Well, I decided when I first started tinkering in this industry that
back in the day, there was a conversation between inventors that went 
something like this:

"Dick, I predict that computers and technology -- and most importantly, 
we computer/technology geeks -- will rule the world someday."

"Yes Jane, but the trick is to keep the power for ourselves."

"I know, how about we give all the parts and devices really
complex, scary, or meaningless names?  That way, people will think
our jobs are way harder than they are and they will be in awe of us."

"Good idea!  Plus, with all those technobabble terms, we can pretend 
we're on Star Trek while we work."

And so it was.  "Pictures on a screen" became "Graphical User
Interface," "surface mount phone jack" became "biscuit jack," and
so on.  Knowledge is power.  Be careful with whom you share power.

By the way, the job went fine today ... on my end.  While the help
desk and I went back over everything to determine why the LAN couldn't
see the world and vice versa, I started looking at the router.
Though it wasn't part of my task and I don't know jack about Cisco
routers, I put my problem-solving skills into action found that MCI
Worldcom had miswired the thing when they installed it.  To top that
off, there was a typo on MCI's end and they had remotely configured
the wrong store.  So at least I went away happy that the extra 2
hours spent on site was due to MCI's incompetence and not only did
I do everything right, I caught *their* error.  Whoo-hoo!

- Mary; suddenly feeling very networky for a hardware geek!