Foreign territory
I work for a software company. That implies that I have some general knowledge of computers. I have just that -- general knowledge. Slightly more knowledge than the average end-user. I don't have the benefit of formal education or intense training; I basically learned what I learned by poking around until I found something that confused me, and then I clicked on "Help" and did whatever it said.

When you work for a software company, though, general knowledge is not enough. I know this. I don't think I really sold them on the idea that my knowledge of the inner workings of a computer goes beyond general. What I do as well as anybody and better than most is manipulate page-design programs. I can remember keyboard shortcuts and draw boxes and apply styles at high speed, and I can assemble said pages in such a way that they don't make the printer choke when I hit Apple-P. More importantly to this company, I can tell other people how to do that.

But: when it comes time to RAID the SCSI with a Gigabit switch, that's where I have to get off the train. I'm in the process of very quickly teaching myself how to do that, how to speak to the Oracle, how to talk in abbreviations and acronyms (JPEG your own TIFF, you EPS! Or I'll PDF your ATAPI.) Today I was in a project meeting, where the hard-core inner workings of hardware and networks were being discussed. I nodded along and said "yeah" at the appropriate points and kept up as best as I could, but I have to confess they lost me at "gigabit switch." I drew the diagram on my legal pad, though, so I have it to refer to when I look up what "RAID" stands for. (Quick explanation: RAID refers to a server drive setup; on the server that was the topic of today's session, the drives are RAID Level 1: the data is written to the server's hard drive and is simultaneously written to another hard drive. If the first hard drive goes kerblooey, the second hard drive can be plugged in to the first hard drive's slot with no loss of data. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. And yes, I wrote the explanation from memory, but I had to look up what the acronym stood for.)

I have some experience at this. When I built The Freelance Gig from scratch -- a gig which included some hard-core hardware setup -- I went in knowing basically nothing. I came out four months later with a Web site of which I'm really proud and some good experience breaking into a computer and installing cards and calibrating monitors and printers. Then, of course, I went right back to being a journalist, and promptly relegated a lot of what I learned to some long-term memory that so far has been difficult to access.

Bottom line is this: I have a lot to learn, and fast. This is what I signed up for, so I'm OK with that. I can toss around the acronyms with the best of them. At some point -- some point very soon -- I'm going to have to actually know what they mean.