What's In A Name?

The printers at work have names. Not just the usual Canon 12000A DXG stuff but the names of animals. The one nearest my desk is dolphin, or Dolphin if we're being really formal. The names are necessary, I assume, for our noble IT staff (who are seriously good at providing excellent service) to identify precisely which one each computer links to. We have a lot of printers.

I've known about the dolphin thing for a long time, ever since the first week I worked at the place and was told I was connected to it. Earlier this week an IT guy connected me to mule as dolphin was temporarily down, and today I needed to link to penguin to print some official IB forms. The first time I've been unfaithful to the ever-reliable (except this week) dolphin.

What I'm leading up to is that it suddenly occurred to me how uninteresting the names were, despite one colleague finding them imaginative for the IT Department. The suddenness coincided with my facetious suggestion that we should be linking to killer whale when someone forgot penguin's name. After the initial facetiousness it came to me that my idea was a profoundly sensible one. Frankly one penguin is much the same as a dolphin, but no one's likely to forget a killer whale; plus any outsider hacking into our system (note the technical precision of my vocabulary here) would be instantly deterred by the sheer craziness of an organisation adopting such a moniker just for a printer. (And we'd probably be up for all sorts of prizes for creativity.) In rapid order I came up with ocelot, duck-billed platypus and howler monkey as further possibilities. I'm particularly pleased with the last of these.

So, all in all, a fruitful day, I'd say.