U is for Understanding

Somehow I've been at what I still consider my "new" job for almost a year. 2017 has flown by, no doubt at least partly due to mental exhaustion from sheer information overload. The learning curve feels less like an Escher staircase these days, but I still often find myself in a meeting, wondering WTH people are talking about as they casually toss around terms that send me scrambling for the acronym glossary I was given, along with a metric crap-ton of other info, my first week on the job. When that fails, there's always Google, in which there's no shame, as my boss's boss once told me the CEO caught her surreptitiously searching for a term he used in an EVP meeting. (As a testament to his character, he paused and said he wanted to be sure everyone was clear on what he was talking about). 

Such instances have gotten fewer and farther between without my noticing, but I got caught last week. I was on a WebEx (how most of my meetings take place, as State Fund has offices all over California) with a supervisor,  my boss, the head of Government Affairs, and the manager of our Special Investigation Unit, the guys who detect and prevent fraud. To put things into perspective, the insurance industry has its own lingo, and workers' comp, being a specific type of insurance, has its own dialect, so to speak. Add to that, the particulars of SIU, with terms like sub rosa (the coolest so far) and I'm feeling pretty good that I'm holding my own in the conversation.

Then my boss asks, "Do we have an MOU with that vendor?" What on earth is an MOU?? To Google I go, quickly discovering that it means, Memorandum of Understanding. W. T. F? How is that even a thing? Wouldn't any reasonable human being just say agreement or contract? Welcome to the government, boys and girls...I think that one wins the prize for this year. But something tells me 2018 has more than a few gems in store for me.