an unsuspecting ‘carbon based lifeform’
Surely an unsuspecting CaBaL?
BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "Just wanting to know if you've got the answers to the RFIs on our RFP – as we need them ASAP," the Boss says, practicing his acronyms. "The RFIs for the RFP?" the PFY says. "You never said you needed them PDQ. I emailed the vendor for clarification but they were either AFK or AWOL so I …
While it's not amusing, I think that was put in there as an attempt by whatever person got the task of assembling that list to include something slightly interesting or humorous. The over-acronymization of things somehow manages to make everything sound stupid or unpleasant.
I worked at a company which was very dependent on acronyms without reason. They had at least three acronyms for "when will it be done": ETA, EDA, and ECD, though I wouldn't be surprised that they had more which I either didn't see or have managed to forget. But that wasn't enough, because they also had the acronyms EDD and DFAD ("expected date for date" and "date for a date", because they found saying "When will you know the timeline" too difficult as well. These were just some of the stupidest ones they had, but they had a list of several hundred acronyms on a wiki page just in case you wanted to bore yourself into a coma.
Not only do they multipy, but they can turn on their masters too. I run a monthly report known as the MONARCH report (because it is the One Report To Rule Them All, and I couldn't get away with using MORDOR ;) ).
I named the thing and it had a definite clever meaning, but after ten years even I can't remember what it stands for, only that the MON was short for 'Monthly.'
Of course, it still pays dividends - when we needed some secondary reports, they naturally became known as the Prince of Wales report (PoW), and then the Duke of Cambridge (DoC)... We did draw the line at Princess Beatrice, though!
We were coming up with 'new' acronyms for fun, and I was in a bit of a bad mood due to a major network vendor pushing their new video conferehce equipment - which was no better than what we currently had deployed - so I came up with an acronym for 'completely useless new technology', which is kinda funnier on this side of the Atlantic, just the way 'shag' isn't. (I recall shag carpet being a big thing in the 70s, I often wondered what Brits thought we were doing with it)
Also, nobody stepped on the pressure plate that activates the pneumatic equipment lifter which arguaby could do with some fine tuning given that the initial impulse is enough to send a midsized telco rack into the drop ceiling. For reference, a midsize telco rack weighs about as much as the average boss after lunch.
We have one of those somewhere on our intranet - or used to, haven't seen it in a while... We are a specialist industry, so it kind of makes sense - we may as well be speaking Klingon sometimes as far as outsiders are concerned.
I do recall one time we moved into a new building when the managers running the orientation session proudly decreed than this building was to be an 'acronym free zone', and we were to use the full and proper terms for everything from now on and correct anyone who forgot. I only remember this as I got corrected by one of them in the meeting for saying PPE rather than Personal Protective Equipment at some point.
Reality, of course, mean the edict never survived us all leaving the room ;)
They're obviously ex-employees of Intel.
They're the only company I know of who have to have a (semi-official) dictionary for all the acronyms they insist on using, just so people coming in may have a vague chance of understanding a little.
For example, they insist we (vendor contractors) used only the top level of the MLCP, whereas of course anyone else would just tell you to use the top floor of (multi-level) car park to put park your car...
I'm rather disappointed that the (SIXTY-FIVE PAGE!!!) IBM dictionary even contains a facetious — and different from Horst's version — example expansion of ACRONYM ("A Convenient Reduction Of Nomenclature, Yielding Mnemonic Syllables"), but it doesn't define or acknowledge "backronym".
Oxford Dictionaries "traced the word backronym to a 1983 letter from Meredith G Williams in 'The Washington Post'" (according to The Independent), so it'd almost definitely been making the rounds by 1990.
Our R&D people used to run an acronym database on a spare area of one of their servers that got discovered by those outside of R&D and grew so popular that it eventually got rebuilt as a wiki that allowed anybody in the company to explain terms as well as acronyms.
Unfortunately the bean counters got wind of it and as it had no owners, business case, costings, ISO compliance documentation, etc, it had to be removed from the company intranet.
And manglement still insist on sending out missives referring to KPIs, CoEs and the latest EBITDA, expecting us mere plebs to understand
The problem is in Intel it's almost become a language all of its own.
Reading Simon's article was just like reading a transcript of far too many meetings I've been in with them over the years. The only difference is Simon is quite funny with it...
I need a few of these now to clear the mental palette of that thought ----->
In Unix systems of old there was an app for that : "wtf". On some *nix systems it is still installed by default although it tends to be more like a personnal dic than a shared one. Shared definitions these days seem to be "shared" on platforms such as Sharepoint because they have the uncontestable advantage of not being searchable in any meaningful way which allows every branch (and in many cases, every team) in the same organisation to have different definition for the same term / acronym. Sometimes several per team. We live in a wonderful world.
... of certain meetings that involved a considerable military presence. I quickly discovered that the different service branches love to outdo each other constructing the most obscure and gut-wrenchingly difficult TLAs and ETLAs, creating new ones PDQ when required. Definitely OTT and a complete PITA.
I remember reading about a young officer at his first posting who had written a report chock full of TLAs.
His superior promptly returned it to his desk with the letters "UNA" scrawled across every page.
Perplexed, the young officer asked what UNA stood for.
"Use No Abbreviations", came the reply!