I was working and in the team chat, a manager wrote “Here are some alerts, write up some SOPS for them for the contractors to work from.”

I’d never heard of SOPS before, so I wrote back “SOPS ?”

His response was “‘SOPS ?’ you’re messing with me right?”

I always hate these responses because the message is “You’re stupid and should be ashamed for asking this question.” Worse yet, I still didn’t know what SOPS was.

I fumed a bit and eventually asked “Is this supposed to encourage me to ask questions?”

About 5 minutes later, I got “SOP = Standard Operation Procedure”

Oh. When we document a Standard Operation Procedure, we call the doc a SOP. It looks like in his attempt to pluralize SOP, he wrote SOPS instead of SOPs.

I wrote back “That I knew. The SOPS threw me”

I’m not sure if I’m still in the dog house, but those “you’re messing with me” responses still annoy me.