God of punctuation

My job sometimes has a weird blend of the incredibly momentous and the most trivial minutiae.

For example, the doomed project makes frequent reference to something which I'll call "XYZ" here. Last week I was told that this is the first reference ever in regulation, or at least this agency's kind of regulations, to XYZ. I guess that's just because it's a relatively new thing, I don't know. But it's important where it appears, and it appears on big and valuable and dangerous things. If we don't handle it just right, that could cost people lots and lots of money and cause environmental damage and maybe loss of life. That's not certain, or we would be taking XYZ even more seriously than we are, but it definitely seems possible. And, as I've said, parts of the approval process for the doomed project are going to be expedited to help with the "deadline", so XYZ will be covered sooner than it would otherwise.

So how am I handling it? Well, first of all, I'm annoyed that we're doing anything with it at all. As I've said, the doomed project should be a narrow, limited thing to have any chance at all of meeting the deadline. To my non-expert eyes, XYZ, while it might be important, looks like the kind of thing that's outside the "correct" scope of the project. So it bugs me that it's in the rulemaking at all instead of having one all to itself.

But that's just my general attitude to this and many other things about this project. What have I personally, recently been doing about it? Answer: trying to figure out when and if variations on the acronym are acceptable. That is, can we use phrases like "XY computers" or "XY sensors" or "XY facility"? The answer from the team was no; we should say "XYZ" where appropriate, and if that really doesn't make sense, we should spell out the first two words. Variations are not acceptable, I was told. But I have googled some uses of it and apparently the industry actually does use them. At the moment I'd taking refuge in the exact words of what the team agreed upon and I was told to do, but if this project wasn't on such a short deadline I'd probably try to figure out when and if and how we should be using variations.

So: this is a ground-breaking problem with wide implications for industry and the public, fast-tracked to gain the full force of law as soon as possible, but I personally doubt we should even be doing anything about here at all. My role in it is making sure that an acronym is used consistently, and I have doubts about that too.