The DU Lounge
Related: Culture Forums, Support Forums"Drinking from a fire hose." I heard this expression today
For the first time.
Can someone elucidate?
yewberry
(6,530 posts)Inundated to the point of being wasteful/ painful/ dangerous.
TwilightZone
(25,479 posts)I also recall this one at MIT, which was a couple years later.
https://metaist.com/blog/2010/05/origin-drink-from-fire-hose.html
It could certainly predate Al, but that's the one that comes to mind.
As yewberry noted, it basically means being overwhelmed by circumstances.
marylandblue
(12,344 posts)Getting information on the Internet is often compared to drinking from a firehouse. Google any topic and you will get 10 million links. You can only read the top few and hope it has what you need, but it's still just a tiny taste of what is out there.
Autumn
(45,120 posts)coming out of that hose.
True Dough
(17,320 posts)He's invented so many words and expressions, unlike any other human being in history!
rurallib
(62,448 posts)I predict
True Dough
(17,320 posts)with the same force at which it entered!
csziggy
(34,137 posts)jrandom421
(1,005 posts)when you're in a situation where information comes at you in such rapid torrents, it's like it's being shot at you by a high pressure fire hose. Your task is to absorb (or drink) this huge rapid torrent of information. It's like trying to drink (like we did as kids on summer days with the garden hose), but from a 6-inch fire hose, pumping water at 100 PSI.
It's a situation that happened to me, when I was hired by a company, and they literally put me in as the subject matter expert for the whole company on my first day. I had so much information from so many different people I had to absorb and understand, while at the same time, be the "expert" for other areas of the company. The people feeding information only had their piece of information, and it became my job to gather information from all these sources, and make it a coherent whole in my first week on the job.
Pachamama
(16,887 posts).....be bombarded with the lies and outrageous revelations about what Trump and his crime family have done just that day alone and the impossible task to trying to process it all.....
eppur_se_muova
(36,289 posts)"Studying at MIT is like trying to get a drink from a fire hose" from HOTOGAMIT, the (unofficial?) student handbook.
cf "an embarassment of riches"