No more incidents at Copernica
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When I came to work for the first time at Copernica, I started as a support employee. On this very first day I was also introduced to the Copernican use of the term incident. Before that, I only read this word in the newspapers. For example when a Swede was committing welfare fraud in Bulgaria using false papers. Personally I could use the word when I try to convince a policeman that I have never passed a red traffic light on my bicycle before.
In my experience, an incident has a negative connotation. Something bad or tragically, that fortunately has no pattern (yet), but that is being trivialized by speaking of an incident; the world has just gone, but you can go to bed safe and sound, it is just an incident, this will not happen again. Only when the world has gone seven times in a row, the pundits will say in the media: "We can no longer call this an incident, we should take immediate measures to break this pattern for good".
But we also had incidents at Copernica and it had become a catch-all term for everything users sent to our support address. Of course for reporting a bug. But also for normal user questions, suggestions for new features and compliments. A misuse to the word "incident" IMHO.
Tickets
Recently, Copernica rigorously changed the operation of the support tool. Copernica CTO Emiel already has extensively elaborated these changes on this blog. The migration to this new system seemed to me an excellent opportunity to no longer misuse the word incident for anything that arrives our support tool.
What should we then use instead of incidents? Not a very difficult question, if you ask me. For this type of communication one particular word has the most widespread application: ticket, or support ticket. A new message that arrives our support tool, is assigned to a ticket number and contains all the back-and-forth communication following the initial message. So, as of now, we use tickets.
If you call our support department, you will probably still be asked to ‘send an incident to our support address’ for a while (in Dutch: een incidentje inschieten). After all these years (and almost 25.000 incidents since we started counting) it will of course take some time before we're all used to this new term at Copernica.
By the way. When the world will cease to exist, unfortunately we do not know. Incidents are damn hard to predict.
