Flashes of Panic

I just got done sending this message to a co-worker, in response to an email (note: heavily edited.)

Yeah, one of the spam-filtering daemons apparently decided to go home for the weekend.... I noticed a lot more [spam] making it through, but only this morning checked and noticed spamd wasn't running, so I restarted it.

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes most people cross their eyes and/or glaze over while I'm talking to them. And if I try to explain everything, it defeats the whole purpose of the jargon (abbreviation and efficiency, though I imagine sometimes it looks more like exclusion and obfuscation.)

For what it's worth: a daemon is a program (process) which runs constantly, usually on a server, waiting for a request from elsewhere. (Windows calls them "services.") A daemon program is usually named with a "d" on the end, so in this case, "spamd" is the daemon that filters email for spam. (Two other common daemons are ftpd, which lives on a file server handling FTP requests, and httpd, which makes the web go 'round.)