We called it the temporary import. I named it that myself, on a Thursday afternoon, in a hurry, with a delivery date close enough that nobody wanted to discuss it. It was supposed to live for three weeks.
It lived for well over a year.
I only looked at that name again when it failed on a morning we needed it, and someone on the team asked the obvious question on the call: who owns this? Nobody answered. Not because people were dodging. Because it was called temporary, and nobody owns temporary.
A word that made a dozen calls
When I went back through it, the pattern embarrassed me.
No tests, because why test something that’s going away? No alerting, for the same reason. No mention in the notes when someone new joined the team. No slot in anyone’s planning. Every one of those was a reasonable call to make about something temporary.
But nobody ever sat down and decided that a part of our delivery would run unowned and unmonitored. There was no meeting. There was just a word, and everyone who read it drew the sensible conclusion.
The fix itself was small. The damage wasn’t. We lost most of a day, missed something we’d promised for that week, and I got to explain why a thing I’d personally labelled as short-lived was sitting in the middle of the delivery path.
The names I’d been handing out
Once I started listening for it, I heard it everywhere. Mostly from my own mouth.
“Phase two.” On most projects I’ve worked on, that’s where we put the things we’ve agreed not to do but don’t want to say so. “A small change.” I’ve said that before knowing what the change was, and watched an estimate shrink in the room before anyone had opened the code. “The new platform,” still called new years later, quietly excusing everything unfinished about it.
None of those are lies. That’s why they work. They arrive before the thinking does, and then they save everyone the trouble of doing it.
The irony is that I’ve spent years being pedantic about naming in code. I’ll leave a review comment about a variable called data. And then I’ll walk into a planning session and call months of uncertain work “the migration,” as if it were one thing.
The half hour at the whiteboard
After the failure, I proposed we rename it. I expected a two-minute job. I felt slightly silly even bringing it up.
It took half an hour and we didn’t finish.
I asked the people who touched it to say what it actually did, in one plain sentence. We got three different sentences. One person thought of it as a data feed. Someone else believed it was a safety net for when the main route failed. And I was still describing it as a stopgap until the proper integration landed.
The proper integration had been dropped months earlier. I was the one who had agreed to drop it.
That was the uncomfortable bit. I knew both facts. I’d just never put them next to each other, because the word kept them apart. As long as the thing was called temporary, some part of me could go on believing it was on its way out, and that the shortcut I’d taken was still a shortcut rather than simply how we did it now.
We ended up with a dull name that said what it did. And the moment it stopped saying temporary, the questions came by themselves. Who looks after this? What happens when it fails? Nobody had to push. A boring, accurate name made the missing work visible in a way my good intentions never had.
Why I reach for the soft word
I’d like to say it was carelessness. Some of it was.
But mostly, soft names are comfortable. “Temporary” meant I never had to defend a shortcut. “Phase two” means I don’t have to say no to the person sitting across from me. “A small change” means I get to leave the meeting without a difficult conversation about how little I know yet.
A precise name commits you. If I call something what it is, I have to stand behind it, and sometimes what it is isn’t flattering. That’s the trade I’d been making for years without noticing: a little comfort today, paid for by whoever eventually had to work out what the word meant. Often that was me.
The sentence behind the label
It’s not much of a method. When I catch myself using a label for a piece of work, I try to say the sentence behind it.
Not “phase two” but “we’re not doing this unless someone asks again.” Not “a small change” but “I haven’t looked yet.” The longer version is less pleasant to say out loud. The first time I said the phase two sentence in a meeting, someone was visibly disappointed, and I spent the rest of the hour wishing I’d kept the old phrase. They would still have been disappointed, though. Just later, and with less time to do anything about it.
And when something really is temporary, it now needs a person and a date next to it. If I can’t fill in both, I don’t get to use the word.
I still get this wrong. Last week I called something a quick experiment, and it’s now on its third day with no sign of being either.
The first decision, not the last
I used to treat naming as the last and smallest thing you do to a piece of work. Now I think it’s closer to the first decision, and the one least likely to be examined afterwards. People who weren’t in the room will act on that word long after the reason for it is gone.
If there’s something in your work that everyone calls by a comfortable word, try asking three people to describe it in one sentence.
You may find out you’ve been agreeing on the word and nothing else.