A key that explains terms by repeating the term is NOT USEFUL
I’ve been working with acronyms and a certain level of jargon all day connected to an industry with which, until last week, I had a level of familiarity somewhere between zero and none.
Luckily, the creators of most of the documents I have had to read were thoughtful — and humble — enough to add a glossary of terms where necessary and keys to any other ambiguous or apparently inexplicable notations elsewhere.
I am not a complete idiot but I found myself returning the glossary a few times and I was grateful whenever a key appeared beside options in conditional fields within file descriptions.
We have another strike day on the railways in my part of the country. I am lucky, however, that not too far along the road is a town served by another railway company. It is ironic, of course, that I can benefit from the privatisation and break up of British Railways when I am an ardent proponent of nationalising them again. But that’s a debate for another time.
I want compare useful keys and useless keys. I’ve mentioned the useful keys above. Before returning home this evening I called up the National Rail website to look at the live departure status of trains I was thinking of catching. As I tend to do.
At the foot of the page is a key to the ‘codes’ displayed for the status of a train. The most frequent status codes I see when checking live updates are:
- Delayed
- Cancelled
- On time
- No report
These codes are so ambiguous that National Rail feels the need to provide a key. Here is what the codes mean, according to the National Rail website:
Delayed: This service is delayed
Cancelled: The service has been cancelled
On time: This service is on time
No report: There is no report on the progress of this service yet
Apart from the rather sweet use of the past tense for the cancelled trains, it is hard to see what value is provided by that information. Travelling by train can be stressful on the privatised network — especially when paying for tickets — but I don’t think the stress is enough to kill that many brain cells.
Repeating the same word in the definition is like looking up a dictionary for a word you don’t know and seeing the same word as its definition. Useless, in other words.
What a real key would deliver here would be the definition of extra codes. The service status would be Cancelled (2), for instance, and the key would tell us that the train is not running because they failed to hire enough drivers for the period.
That’s it for tonight. My status is Tired*.
*Key: Tired = The writer is tired
