how to escalate a problem

[Jonathan Lighter]

So "escalating" a disaster, like the hurricane, is a good thing.  What about "the disaster is escalating" (about to be reviewed by people in charge) ?

Such speakers must think that when the Vietnam War was "escalated," it was "bucked" to a higher authority.  (Or "hire authority," as it soon will be.)

JL

Chris Waigl <cwaigl at FREE.FR> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Chris Waigl
Subject: Re: how to escalate a problem
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

>On Aug 30, 2005, at 9:48 AM, George Thompson wrote:
>
>
>>This is from a reply to a message to the Tech Support desk of CSA, a
>>database supplier, regarding a failure of their system:
>>
>>"Thank you very much for contacting CSA Technical Support and please
>>accept my apologies, both for the late answer and the inconvenience
>>this problem is causing you. We appreciate your report as it allows us
>>to
>>escalate problems quickly and see them resolved within a reasonable
>>amount of time.
>>"This particular problem seems to affect users around the globe and it
>>has been escalated to our development team in Bethesda, MD. As soon as
>>they come in this morning they will start to look into this and
>>hopefully resolve the issue by the end of today."
>>
>>
>
>expedite?
>
>arnold
>
>
I've seen this usage of "escalate" in the sense of "pass on from a lower
to a higher level of technical support" before.

See for example this software support page, appropriately entitled
"escalate an incident"
:

----

Escalation

Rogue Wave® Technical Support strives to give our customers the highest
quality technical support by utilizing and maintaining industry-leading
response and customer incident resolution times. However, there may be
times when an incident may need to be escalated.

To escalate an incident to a Rogue Wave® support management, the below
information is required:

* The support incident id number
* The name of the Technical Support Engineer assigned to the incident
* A brief summary of why the incident is being escalated
* A brief explanation of the requirements needed to resolve the
incident

*[...]**

.h++ Escalation*

*Silver* support customers can escalate an incident by either:

* Asking the engineer assigned to the incident to escalate the
problem to a Support Services Manager. The Support Services
Manager will then contact the customer once the request is
investigated and the support incident reviewed.
* Calling the Support Services main or regional office

and requesting to escalate the specific incident.

[...]


*
SourcePro® C++ Escalation
*[...]

*
Stingray® Escalation
*[...]
----

It might just be a metaphor, not an error.

Chris Waigl

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