> This place hadn't quite ascended to the level of giving outages notable names ("Call the Cops", "Silent Night", "A Tree Did It" being just a few from elsewhere), it remained just "1152" after an associated ticket in a bug tracking system.
I found myself in yet another tech gig in an attempt to provide reliability to a company that (as it turned out) was about to have its IPO.
It's easier in a conversation to refer to an outage that was caused by a system called Maya by a descriptive canonical name like "Mayan Apocalypse", than to refer to it as 14351. As companies grow and accumulate more interesting outages, it becomes harder to keep all these magic numbers in your mental cache.
I always wanted to apologize to Sgt. Brink for having to take my calls that day.
Changing the subject mid-sentence does harm readability.
By the way, I also appreciated the post. I’ve been in similar situations in several occasions and never quite figured out how to avoid stigma and bad feelings for stepping on other peoples’ ego. I’ll give your technique a try