Los Angeles County officials have gone PC (politically correct) on PCs (personal computers) — banning as potentially “offensive or defamatory” the words master and slave from computer hard drives and video equipment where they are used to describe primary and secondary circuits.
Under orders from the affirmative action office, county departments have surveyed about 1,000 pieces of equipment and taped over “master/slave” and put “primary/secondary” on the equipment, officials said.
Joe Sandoval, division manager of purchasing and contract services in the Internal Services Department, started the flap with a memo to electronic equipment vendors saying the county wants master and slave labeling removed from computer equipment it buys.
“The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived,” he wrote in the Nov. 18 memo.
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What’s next? Hard drive reparations. And what about computer monitors? Won’t that make some over-sensitive person think of the “Monitor” and the Confederate ship the “Merrimack?”
4 comments
For some reason I knew it would come to this. Being in the computer industry, I have already began to see this in companies changing the names of their hardware from “Motherboards” to “Mainboards” in an attempt to be politically correct. The crap we have to put up with!
This sounds like the opening of a really bad joke.
Another reason why I left Los Angeles.
If only the energy put into trivia like changing computer hardware terminology and other equally inane politically-correct silliness could be used for something productive.