Another pet peeve. Nounifying the word "ask"

Sorry about not blogging, my days are filled with meetings trying to finish up our LH beta2 features - I can't wait until people see this stuff, it's that cool.

But because I'm in meetings back-to-back (my calender looks like a PM's these days), I get subjected to a bunch of stuff that I just hate.

In particular, one "meme" that seems to have taken off here at Microsoft is nounifying the word "ask".

I can't tell how many times I've been in a meeting and had someone say: "So what are your teams asks for this feature?" or "Our only ask is that we have the source process ID added to this message".

For the life of me, I can't see where this came from, but it seems like everyone's using it.

What's wrong with the word "request"?  It's a perfectly good noun and it means the exact same thing that a nounified "ask" means.