• One of my co-workers was a Chinese national and sometimes his command of the English language - coupled with his brevity - led to some "inside jokes" for the DBA group that are still used, years after their first introduction to a conversation (in this case, about troubleshooting). One of these lasting quotes was simply...

    "Database fine."

    Luckily, he was a good sport and knew we weren't poking fun at him when we repeated it as the occasion required shorthand for "stop blaming the database for bad code" and fit nicely on one occasion when we discovered the cause of "performance problems" blamed on the database to be a [huge, very complicated] query that started with "SELECT DISTINCT *" ...