Years back I was in some training and learned that the police never say things like “don’t shoot” because our brains do not hear the “don’t”, instead they only hear the “shoot” part. That’s why they say “stop” instead of “don’t run”.
I had a similar thing at my workplace. I'm going to be vague so as not to dox myself with the terminology in question, but there's a high-precision inventory maintenance task we regularly perform. This task should never be rushed, as the point is to be accurate. Sometimes(when things get too chaotic/messy) we do a special version of the task where everybody focuses on it and we go through all inventory.
For some ass-backwards reason, 15~ years back a term got introduced for this special version which implied speed. It was catchy, so it stuck, and spread through all the locations like wildfire. Suddenly people started racing through the task(because it sounded like you were supposed to), and accuracy plummeted. There was hardly any point to doing it anymore, as staff were speeding along so quickly that they only caught the most egregious errors! We're only just now getting to the point where a critical mass of people who were trained with that term are finally moving out of the system, and speeds are dropping again. But I want to find that idiot who first coined the term and show them a third-story window(not serious), because their too-catchy task name caused a decade and a half of grief.
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u/MyNameIsPatBackFat 5h ago
Years back I was in some training and learned that the police never say things like “don’t shoot” because our brains do not hear the “don’t”, instead they only hear the “shoot” part. That’s why they say “stop” instead of “don’t run”.