Code & Sundry

Jon G Stødle

A Group Chat Called 'The Toilet'

208 words, 2 minutes to read

When I get to name things, I like to give those projects, group chats, etc, a name that has some reasoning or thought behind it. Sometimes it might be humorous by elevating something casual with a name using formal language, and sometimes it's through some convoluted steps of random thoughts and trivia.

One such time was when I had to come up with a name for a group chat for me and two other software developers who worked on the backend / server part of a service. We needed a place to discuss technical stuff without spamming the other team members. I can assign this group chat a name, so of course I will give it a name, but what to call it?

As it happened the three of us had our desks located in the farthest corner of the office. That corner was the "backend corner". Then my mind jumped to the (somewhat overhyped) fun fact that people occasionally relieved themselves in corners at Versailles, the palace used as a retreat by French kings. And according to Google Translate lavabos is French for toilet or washroom, so the name of the group chat was of course Les lavabos.