Remember, Microspeak is not necessarily jargon exclusive to Microsoft, but it’s jargon that you need to know if you work at Microsoft.
When something has gone horribly wrong and requires immediate attention, one way to describe it is to say that it is on fire. The obvious metaphor here is that the situation is so severe that it is as if the office building or computer system was literally on fire.
Here are some citations I found.
I’ll be back in Redmond on Monday. Is anything on fire?
This person is just checking in to see if there are any emergencies.
I think the Nosebleed branch is still on fire.
This person is saying that they think that the Nosebleed branch is still in very bad shape. My sense that being on fire is worse than being on the floor. If a branch is on the floor, then that probably means that there’s a problem with the build or release process. But if the branch is on fire, it suggests that they have identified some critical issue in the branch, and everybody is scrambling to figure it out and fix it.
While looking for citations, I found the minutes for a meeting titled “What’s on Fire Meetings”, which I guess is a regular meeting to report on whatever disaster is currently unfolding this time.
I even found some citations from my own inbox.
That’s my top item once I can wrap up the work I’m doing for the Nosebleed feature, but Nosebleed is always on fire.
Even the fires are on fire.
There is a channel on our team called “Fires” which is where people report on anything on fire and collaborate on putting out that fire. Putting out fires is the preferred way to say that someone is trying to fix whatever is on fire.
Bonus chatter: Note that this is not the same as saying that a person is “on fire”, which is slang for saying that they are doing exceptionally well.
Similarly, in Serbian and Croatian, a firefighter is a “fire extinguisher”; a pressurised spray cylinder used to put out a fire is a “device for extinguishing fires”.
(Hopefully this doesn’t double-post)
Here in Spain we sometimes use “apagafuegos” (literally “fire extinguisher”, an informal way of calling a firefighter). We use it in phrases such as “estar de apagafuegos” (“being/acting like a firefighter”) to refer to a job where planning is so bad you are always in emergence mode, or to one of those weeks when everything fails at the same time.