In case of doubt, ask for clarification
Your yearly reminder of why to use a clear and precise language and to ask to clarification when your teammates do not.
As an example of what not to do, here I am earlier this year with a teammate, doing some Ops work (Unilog is a backend service, akvoflow-87 is a tenant of another backend service that depends on the Unilog):
I hope it is not obvious to you, as it was not for me, but what my teammate was actually asking was:
Can I completely decommission Unilog forever?
But what I understood was:
Can I stop Unilog for a minute?
Result: a massive slowdown of the whole system for a few hours.
We have been talking about decommissioning that Unilog service the whole week, so it even crossed my mind that maybe it was related to it, I thought he surely cannot be asking about decommissioning it.
Silly me for not asking.