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Lech – I am sorry!!!
Arkady, yours is the traditional Chinese fire drill. I’m guessing it was used in the business context I quoted above on *rob*’s call, generally a pointless exercise in which everyone at work has to drop everything they’re doing last minute to scramble to get something done that everyone knows is pointless to do at all.
In law, it would often involve, for example, getting a complaint ready to file overnight in case the other side doesn’t return an agreement tolling the statute of limitations, precluding the need to file the next day. The partners would make everyone drop everything, pull an all nighter drafting the complaint, knowing it would almost certainly never be filed, and we all knew it too. So it was referred to as a Chinese fire drill.
Arkady, that was one of the definitions I knew, along with the more generic meaning of a stupid/pointless activity.
When I was a kid a Chinese fire drill was when you were in a car stopped at a stoplight & everyone in the car flung the doors open, got out, ran counterclockwise around the car, got back into your same seats & drove off as the light turned green.
I heard the term “Chinese Fire Drill” growing up, but I think it has been a decade or two since it came up.
losers
🙂
In the business context, a Chinese Fire Drill means: “The act of a group of individuals accomplishing nothing. The term is also used as a figure of speech to mean any large, ineffective, and chaotic exercise.”
dave is probably in the middle of a chinese fire drill right now!
*rob*
quote:
Haven’t heard Chinese Fire Drill in some time, *rob*. Prolly not considered too PC anymore.
ive never heard it before, EVER. but now that you say it’s not PC, it might make a little more sense… i googled it tho and it didnt seem that bad? i think there’s gotta be a new definition for it. i saw two definitions and one was SUPER LONG (i didnt read) the other small def. made sense tho. this was from LA, btw.
*rob*