Do the needful

If you noticed my tagline is not state of the art, please consider the fact, that Indian blog taglines suck.

A series of so true videos about outsourced tech support. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen them yet

Some colleagues of mine are supporting banking system. It doesn’t always work rght, so they had their techniques to fix things. As time passed by, they got more and more of those small scripts, switches and tricks to get things rolling.

One day the combined all of that into one big script, that would just be added to end of day procedure and everything would be done automatically. Of course, it needed a name. First thing that came to their mind was “do the needful”, as the script was actually trying to do everything, that was needed at a particular time.

The name caught on and suddenly everyone started to use it as the official name – the business is requesting to setup new instance, but without running “dotheneedful”, other technical teams are asking to check if “dotheneedful” went fine etc.

It’s hillarious.

Recently a support person from India got nervous on a call, and instead of “yes” he started saying “same”.

So it was like
“Are you saying you don’t have access to that server?”
“Same”

Which took me a while to understand he was confirming like that.