Beat down by acronyms

I'm not going to be posting much over the next two weeks. Next week I'm going to be in Ft. Lauderdale at the AAU Taekwondo National Championships, trying not to vomit competing in sparring and forms with all the other ladies old enough to know better. I'll probably have internet access, but maybe not much free time, between the competing and coaching and cheering my teammates and moving hotels and lying by the pool. I will try to report results as I get them, though.

As for this week, I'm struggling to meet a deadline for a project, one completely different than what I'm used to doing. Give me a biography or a historical essay and I can bury myself in research and come up with something fairly literate. This time, though, I'm writing a biography of a company ... and it's a company that provides IT services, so I have absolutely no background on the subject. I know what VoIP means (voice over internet protocol, that Skype thing), but I keep having to look up dozens of other acronyms: SBX, SIP, LDAP, IVR, CPBA—the list goes on and on. What's worse, half the time I look up the acronym, change the letters into words, and still don't understand what the heck they're talking about.

So if there's nothing new here, it's because I'm either puzzling out acronyms or kicking my sparring bag, trying to be ready for the next two weeks. Hopefully when I return in July, I'll have my life back—unless my editor assigns me another company that loves acronyms.