I have worked in industry and the medical fields and now teach some in my retirement. Any time I use acronyms (letter abbreviations for multiple words) I say the complete words ( like 4x4Pete explains above) then say HVAC. I do this when writing too, in an email or technical writing.
Here’s a story when I was working as a radiation therapist at a county hospital. The management requested a “volunteer” to attend monthly department meetings. Since our department head didn’t want to go, he appointed me, a former mechanical engineer. So I went to the first meeting and the others didn’t have a job for me but wanted me to “do something” before next months meeting. I had spent the past six months working with our doctor and the electronic medical records files, so I kept on with that. As I searched for our project I noticed a rash of acronyms used for all the various departments keeping someone from doing an accurate search. I came back next month with this example.
When searching for the Emergency Room statistics I noticed there was very little data. I spent many days on this puzzle, speaking with a variety of personnel from the department, the Information Technology (IT) department etc. The bulk of the files were finally found in a weird directory and labeled (ED) emergency department. When it was my turn to present my months labors I asked the assembled group of doctors, nurses and department heads “what term would they use to search for documents from the emergency room?” Giving my reason for using that name as the name on all of the hospital signage for that department. When answering the members gave a half a dozen different answers. When I told them they could not get an accurate answer to the most common name of “the ER, or Emergency Room” by typing that into the search function of their computers, they did not believe me. My proposal of reorganizing the computer system into agreed upon names and designation of every department was met by stares of disbelief. My proposal would have meant loads of work for someone in each department, but would have resulted in streamlined operations, cost savings and simplification.
I showed where our department in the cancer center had cleaned up our computer documentation practices along with group agreement on terms. We now could accurately treat, document and bill our patients without everyone doing their own thing. It took the doctor and I probably about 80 hours over those six months working in our spare time.
Around a week later I received an email telling me “ I would no longer be required to attend monthly department meetings”
