YouTube: Watch the 1 minute, 41 second scene from Police Academy.

I first met a colleague, Marta Morgan, when I worked at GTE Telecommunication Systems in Phoenix, Arizona. Recall the old days when you could do what was considered fancy things with your land line like call forwarding or speed dialing. Back then special purpose telephone switch computers made that happen. Today I am a cell-phone-only kind of guy and don't even have a land line at home nor the office. Special purpose telephony computers have essentially been replaced by voice over IP. Things change. Some don't. Though we don't see each other very often, Marta and I are still friends.

When we worked at GTE, Marta had a saying: "Park the car." It refers to a scene from the original Police Academy movie. Marta recently described the saying's origin in an email:

Colleague, John [Schellbach], and I were out on a site road trip in the Midwest — might have been the Columbia, MO site [who had a GTE telephone switch]. The movie had just come out, and the site guys thought that the scene was representative of the stupid things that tech management in Phoenix was telling them to do. Given that John and I were there exclusively to sit around and provide an "on-site presence," we were pretty much in agreement about that. Over time, we morphed the phrase from "do whatever stupid thing your boss tells you to" into "just get it done."

Since my days at GTE I have often used the phrase "Park the car" to mean "just get it done." Regardless of the technology one is working with, sometimes you just have to park the car.

Etymology is alive in the lab.