Shelves and drawers

Sometimes at work, I find myself debating something that feels important because it’s being written in the spec, getting referenced and scrutinized by a bunch of engineers, and serving as a shared Source of What We Agree to be Real. Then I realize it could sound kind of comical when I zoom out…

Recent exchange went something like:

Ah ok. You might be better acquainted with this terminology than I am, so could you provide more context? Before updating the requirements doc, I want to make sure we're optimizing for user understanding. Colloquially, we might be confusing 'shelf life' and 'drawer life'.

Do customers actually use/understand the term 'drawer life'? (Is this the industry norm?) Want to make sure any changes we make actually improve the customer experience rather than just being more technically precise.

Words have lately felt like my most important tool. I am trying to get better at using them. So far, I know that a shelf doesn’t necessarily have an attached door to pull while a drawer does, and a drawer is also where you throw things that you don’t think you will use for a while. But if you put something either on a shelf or in a drawer, its battery should last a long time without draining, that’s for sure. But for some reason, people get irritated when I use one to mean the other.