Please Stop Pinging My Wheelhouse

So now that I work in financial services I have to be up on the lingo. I have to know the acronyms and I have to know what the "kids on the street" and the "kids on The Street" are saying these days. My job has an abundance of acronyms...CER, VER, REC, RGGI to name a few. I still prefer the simple, yet effective, WT for White Trash.

Two words that have really made their way into not only the industry lexicon, but I think everyone's lexicon are "ping" and "wheelhouse".

PING

Ping used to go with pong, plain and simple. And then when you got old enough you basically stopping saying ping, because you started substituting "beer" for "ping". It was kind of like a rite of passage. Like a dormant sexually transmitted disease apparently "ping" is baaaack. You are walking down the hall. You have your blackberry in your pocket. You feel it buzzing. You say, "dude, who's pinging me?" Or you're at a bar. Your buddy is taking his sweet time in the men's room while you wait entertaining the marginally attractive girl he thinks looks like Jessica Beil. You ping him and tell him to hurry the hell up. Back in the day you'd call or text or if you're really old, you'd go and say something in person. At some point along the line people stopped caring to distinguish between how you label initiating contact, so they just say "ping". I don't have a blackberry, so I'm not sure it's possible to ping someone yet. I guess that's something to look forward to.

WHEELHOUSE

By no means is this word new. If you pinged dictionary.com (is that possible?) you'd find the following under wheelhouse...

"An enclosed area, usually on the bridge of a vessel, from which the vessel is controlled when under way"

For me, wheelhouse was primarily used when describing a baseball pitch that fell right into your sweetspot that you'd crush. Now, everyone and their mother is saying wheelhouse. Wheelhouse made it's way back into my life during my recent trip to Aruba. It started when we were sitting around one morning and we were thinking about what to do. My friend said "drinking beers on the lazy river would definitely be in my wheelhouse". So the whole trip we were always talking about our wheelhouses. At two in the morning after a night out we'd all talk about what kind of food would be in our wheelhouse. Out on the boat deep sea fishing we concurred that catching a marlin would definitely be in our wheelhouse. We met a blonde girl who we all agreed we'd invite into our respective wheelhouses, and by the end of the trip we just simply referred to her as "Wheelhouse". For example, "is that Wheelhouse over there by the pool?"

Anyway, I've been away from the working world for some time now, but people at work are dropping "wheelhouse" every five minutes. Projects, agreements, vacations...I mean, how big are these wheelhouses these days. All I know is that I'm going to start dropping wheelhouse into conversations at least once a day now.

What really is in my wheelhouse right now is sleep.